The Fifth Season

We had a pear tree, and it was the joy of the neighborhood.

It, and my mother. My beautiful, bright-eyed mother, with her aprons and baking prowess and generosity. She baked pies and tarts with our fresh-grown pears, giving them to our friends and neighbors like a plague. She made jams with them, sorbets, salads.

But even with her love of our tree and its many, many pears, there is only so much one can do with a single fruit before it becomes uninspired. This tree was like a hydra - where one pear was plucked, two grew in its place. Naturally, a good many went unharvested, falling to the ground like misshapen green hail.

So each year, when summer was in full swing, it came time for my seasonal chore. As the youngest of three children, my older brother and sister insisted it was a rite of passage, winking at me as they went about their lives.

For days on end, in the unforgiving heat, I would pick up fallen pears.

My mother would set me up with a plastic blue bucket and lather me in sunscreen, then send me on my way. She paid me an allowance of twenty-five cents per bucket collected. Let’s just say I was criminally underpaid (I complained to HR once; she sent me to my room without pear shortcake). It might sound like a decent enough gig, but let me set the scene:

The sun is hot. The day, humid. All your friends are getting ready to go spend a day at the pool, eating skittles stolen from the vending machines with their skinny little arms. You, on the other hand, are in your backyard, already sweating. Your mom told you to wear that stupid bucket hat you got at the beach last summer to keep the sun out of your eyes, but you ignored her. SPF 50 starts dripping down your forehead, stinging your eyes until you’re so blind you might've even been able to convince yourself you were at the pool if it weren’t for the stench of sweet things rotting in the sun.

Because the worst part of it all was not the heat, or the sunscreen, or the dreadful fear of missing out. No. The very worst part of it was the pears. Delicious at the best of times. Festering, sticky balls of bug-attracting muck at the worst. Once those things hit the ground, they transformed, even when I started early in the season (yes, my family marked time in the summer relative to pear-plucking; we had five seasons. The usual four, and, you guessed it: Pear Season). No matter how close an eye I kept, at least a handful of pears would have been left in the sun for days on end, cooking in the deep green grass with no one the wiser.

At least, no humans. Bugs were the wiser. Bees and ants, a whole village of them, a symphony! They came from far and wide for those discarded pears. And out I would go, bucket swinging from my elbow like a chump, too proud to wear the gloves my mom bought me after my older brother ruthlessly mocked me for them, lifting pear after pear from the ground as the sun crossed the sky.

This was my August for as long as I could remember.

(Excuse me; this was my Pear Season).

Eventually, I got old enough to protest more vehemently against this alarming treatment. After Mom realized that even seventy-five cents a bucket wasn’t enough to keep me on the payroll, she let me resign with dignity. For the last month of summer, I rode bikes and played volleyball and met up with girls at the movies without a care in the world. The pears would disappear from the back lawn as if by magic, although in the back of my mind, I knew it was my mother out there. Wearing the gloves and bucket hat I’d always been too proud to use.

I went to high school, then college, then moved permanently to San Francisco. And it was the damndest thing. When the first of August came around, I craved a pear tartlet for the first time in over a decade. I almost called my mom to tell her, but I was already late meeting my friends at a brewery for an acquaintance’s birthday party.

I did call my mom about a month later, and she told me she was selling the house. She wanted to move to a smaller place a few towns over. More of her friends lived there, and a townhouse would be easier to manage. I almost asked her if she was certain she had a lifetime’s supply of pear jam before moving, but I thought better of it.

The next time I came to visit her was Christmas. We were all crowded into the townhouse: me, my sister and her girlfriend, my brother and his new fiance. The place was noisy and, like its owner, full of color. I could hardly get a moment to myself.

The only place I could get a second’s peace was in my car. It was cold out, so I’d blast the heat and bring a hot coffee and play the radio until it was even louder in that car than it was in the townhouse. The day after Christmas, my mind was wandering so much that I didn’t know where I’d driven until I was already there.

Our old house. As I approached it, that bizarre craving for pears returned. I looked over the fence, where I knew I’d be able to see the old tree’s branches cradling snow.

Nothing was there.

I parked on the side of the street, and, like some type of stalker, I climbed halfway up the fence. Where that pear tree - my sworn lifelong enemy - used to be, there was only a sad little stump, barely visible beneath the snowfall.

A voice said behind me, “Can I help you?”

I almost fell off the fence in surprise.

I turned, and there was a young woman standing near the front door. She was looking at me warily with one eye and glancing at the phone in her hand with the other.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just - I used to live here.”

The woman’s face washed over with relief. “Are you Paul, or Michael?” I cocked my head in confusion (who’s the stalker now, I wondered). “There were marks on the pantry door frame when we moved in,” she explained. I’d forgotten that, how my mother used to measure us on the first day of school.

“I’m Michael,” I said. I was feeling somewhat embarrassed, so I cut right to the chase. “What happened to the pear tree?”

It was her turn to look at me in confusion. “Pear tree?”

I pointed to the stump. “Yeah. That one right there.”

“We had to cut it down to make room for the playset we’re getting for our kids.”

I nodded, putting my hands in my pockets, as they were now red with cold.

“I didn’t know it was a pear tree,” she said thoughtfully. Which made sense. You wouldn't really be able to tell during autumn. “Huh. That might've been nice.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”