In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb: On Fruit

შუადღე მშვიდობისა ჩემო მეგობრებო, საყვარელებო, და ასე შემდეგ. თუმცა ამ დღეებში არ ვფიკრობ ხოლმე ამერიკის შესახებ მაინც იმედია თქვენთან სულ კარგად მიდის. ხო ვიცი რომ ძალიან ცუდი ამინდი ყოფილა ჩემ სტატში და სხვები ასევე. მგონი საქარველოს შარშანის საშინელი ზამთარი გავიდა ამერიკაში! ძალიან დიდი ბოდიში იმისთვის…

Good evening me friends, my loved ones, and everyone else! Although these days I’m not thinking about America much I hope everything is going well for you all. I know that there has been really bad weather in my state and other states- I think Georgia’s bad winter from last year went to America! Really sorry about that…

In like a lion, out like a lamb. Welcome to March, suckers! Yeah, you suckers who live on planet earth in a time of great climactic upheaval. Here is Georgia, a country nestled in between the upper and lower Caucus mountain ranges, it is typical to have terrible cold winters with lots of snow (at least in the mountainous regions and the south. And the central part. And most of the other parts, too). This year, barely any snow and extremely mild temperatures. I know I’ve remarked on it before in a post or two, but it really is noticeable in March. So far, six days into this tumultuous month of transition, we’ve had bright sunny days, days of constant snow, days of misty rain, and days that combine these elements in fun, imaginative little ways, like a gourmet chef working with caviar, mud, sour patch kids, and tree bark to take his restaurant “The Ides of March” to the next level of experimental post-modern gastronomy.

The weather doesn’t actually bother me very much, whatever it is doing, but I have heard from several reliable taxi drivers (in between various questions about my personal life) that this kind of winter will harm a lot of the crops in Georgia, of which there are many, as it is a primarily rural and agricultural society. First to suffer will be the fruit. It just breaks my heart to think of it. Fruit has been a mainstay of the seasons of life in Georgia for me…

This past spring and summer I experienced for the first time the utter glory of an abundance of fresh seasonal fruits. During our three months of language classes my cluster and I spent four hours a day in a room on the upper floor of a kind woman’s house learning Georgian. On our two fifteen minute breaks we would eat as many of the white cherries (ალუბალი) as possible from the tree by the balcony. There were fresh pears, plums, plumlike fruits, and blackberry-like tree berries in the spring.

Come summer, it was peaches and pears, adding red cherries and green plums, with apples coming into the mix. I made myself terribly sick on green plums one day, unable to get out of bed the next. By the time mid-summer came around, and we G14s were getting sworn in as volunteers, watermelons were popping up in the villages, many shipped from Kakheti, an eastern region of the country known for meat, wine, and, in the summer time, excellent melons. Not just watermelons, but a light orange melon akin to canteloupe that we served our thirsty campers at LIFE camp in August. I had to leave that camp one day to buy more food with our great Georgian partner from the NGO we were working with. He and I stopped at a stand on the side of the road, there in the hot Kakheti sun. There was a long line of cars all down the road, every trunk bursting with melons. Flood. The. Market.

After school began on a day in September მარიამობა (Mariamoba) arrived, the celebration of the Virgin Mary. My host mother and I feasted for breakfast on watermelon, squash, green grapes, fresh corn, and peach juice with halved peaches floating in it. Then she and my sister and I walked to one of the churches in Kvishkheti under the hot sun to pay respects to relatives in the cemetery.

When September turned into October, it was time for the grape harvest. I helped my first host family cut the dusty clutches of grapes off the vines that they keep, amongst many other families’ gardens, right next to the school where I teach. They put the grapes on the upper back balcony of the house, next to the corn that had also been picked.

And then pseudo winter arrived, bringing with it cold and a change of host family. There was also the joyful abundance of მანდარინი (mandarins) shipped from the west, mostly from the region of Guria. I bought them two kilos at a time and ate every one. My new host sister said mandarins were my boyfriend, and my host mother and friends suggested I go to Guria and get married to a Gurian so that I would never run out of mandarins. I tabled that idea, needless to say.

And now we are coming around the spring again, and there are still apples hanging around, those hardy fellows. Apparently Gori is known for its apples, the hometown of Stalin about an hour east of here that was hit very hard during the 2008 Russian invasion. As spring progresses, I expect those delicious cherries that I associate with my favorite friends from PST will return, reminding me of the rigorous but wonderful language classes from last spring/summer that introduced me to Georgia. I will eat plums off the trees (in a more measured way) and sample the blackberries and their futuristic, “Time Machine”-like white counterparts from the big bushes by the road from the village center to school (I noticed them on a walk with my first host mother last summer. She loves fruit, and picked from them for minutes and gave me some too).

I hope this (though thankfully for me) mild winter does not lead to a fruit vacuum. If anything, the lack of water from the lack of snow and the early blooming in the prematurely warm air and sneaky freeze of the lion of March will damage fruit in Georgia enough so that it simply creates a price hike. I am lucky to live in a village where you can literally walk down the street and pick fruit as you go. Tomorrow morning I will peel an apple and cut it up into the oatmeal that I eat every morning, paying homage to the fruits that sustain me here in this country.