The Lone Pawpaw

            My pawpaw tree has been through too much. Earlier in the summer, after we found five or six pawpaw fruit growing on various branches, the gardeners came. It’s possible that their boss didn’t tell them that the tree was off limits, though the bowtie, two dog collars, and yellow caution tape around his trunk should have been a hint. Mom heard the sound of the chainsaw and sent me out to stop them, way too early in the morning, but by the time I reached the big pawpaw tree six branches had already been removed, and all of the growing pawpaw fruit with them. I managed to communicate with the chainsaw wielding gardener that he was NOT supposed to cut more branches from the tree, and that he should leave the younger trees, about twenty feet away, alone.

            I was sure that that was the end of the pawpaws for the year, and, honestly, I was ready to give up the fight altogether. That tree has been my responsibility for almost twenty years; it survived the murder of the second tree (that time they just went straight for the trunk), and the trauma of being replanted when we moved to the co-op, and the humiliation of wearing a bowtie, but it was starting to feel like a hopeless battle.  

            But, sometime in August, Mom went out for her daily walk and saw that there was another pawpaw on the tree, higher up than the ones we’d noticed before, visible now that the other branches were not obscuring it. I didn’t want to care. A bird or a squirrel would inevitably come along and knock it down or eat it up. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the gardeners had come back in the middle of the night to get that one last branch.

            And then, last week, Mom came in from her walk and handed me a pawpaw the size of an egg. It had fallen from the tree, and we weren’t sure it would be edible, but when I cut it open it was ripe and delicious. I need these reminders every once in a while, that good things are possible, and worth working for, even with all of the losses and failures along the way. It was just one small piece of fruit, split between two people, but a little bit of pawpaw goes a long way. Apples and oranges and cherries and pears and bananas are all wonderful things, and easily found at the supermarket, but pawpaws almost seem like they’ve been cooking under their skins, building complex flavors and concentrating all of that magic into one small package.

            So, I’m not giving up on my pawpaw tree, though I’m going to have to come up with more creative ideas for how to protect it from the gardeners, and other predators. Maybe an electrified fence? Poison darts? A tree alarm that wakes the whole neighborhood when a squirrel’s foot even touches a branch?

I’ll keep thinking.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?