Expatriate Pawpaw: What is a Windfall?

As you know from the previous blog post, I was out putting organic fertilizer on the pawpaw trees and found a windfall.

Windfall is such an intriguing word. Miriam-Webster offers two definitions:
1. something (as a tree or fruit) blown down by the wind
2. an unexpected, unearned, or sudden gain or advantage

The Oxford English Dictionary gives some enlightening historical sentences that use the term according to Miriam-Webster's first definition:

1661 M. Stevenson Twelve Moneths 42 The wind begins to bluster among the Apples,..and the wind-falls are gathered to fill the Pies for the houshold.

1705 E. Ward Hudibras Redivivus I. ii. 17 The grizly Boar is hunting round; To see what Windfals may be found.

And then the Oxford English Dictionary gives some nice historical sentences that use the term according to the second definition:

1603 P. Holland tr. Plutarch Morals 1237 This man..who otherwise before-time was but poore and needy, by these windfalles and unexpected cheats became very wealthy.

1801 M. Edgeworth Forester in Moral Tales I. 190 He..kept little windfalls, that came to him by the negligence of customers—tooth-pick cases, loose silver.

Windfall's emergence as an "unexpected, unearned, or sudden advantage" orients us in the English language according to a certain perspective--not the perspective of the owner of the orchard but the perspective of the one who wants the fruit from the orchard but doesn't own it. The 1661 usage of the term, which has the the windfall apples gathered to make pies isn't really all that great for the owner of the orchard. If the apples had just stayed on the trees until picked, they could be used for anything, but since the windfalls have fallen before picking, they're only good to make pies (no offense to reader who like pies). As Robert Frost says in "After Apple-Picking": "For all / That struck the earth, / No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, / Went surely to the cider-apple heap / As of no worth." So, before the apples fell, they were pluripotent, like stem cells, and could become any number of things that could be of advantage to the owner of the orchard, if the owner had only beaten the wind to them. But now they're good for one thing--pies (if you're Plutarch) or cider (if you're Frost). That's the perspective of the owner of the orchard.

But the "grizly boar" isn't the owner of the orchard, as he hunts around to see what windfalls may be found. He walks on four legs and can't get to the fruit up in the tree. He counts on the windfalls, lives on them. So while the owner dreads the windfalls, those who don't own but walk through or past the orchard hope for them. And for centuries the non-owners who walk through the orchard or vineyard have had a traditional right to glean or to pick up the windfalls. Leviticus 19:9-10 gives this command to the owner: "And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest. And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger." This ethics of leaving the windfall for the poor and the stranger has been a part of US and European culture. Consider the well-known (and formerly more popular) painting The Gleaners (1857) by Jean-Francois Millet.

So we have the figurative meaning of windfall, not from the owner's standpoint but from the standpoint of the poor and the stranger: "an unexpected, unearned, or sudden gain or advantage." Of course, it's great that the command to the owner is to leave the windfall for the poor and the stranger. That's usually asking owners to do more than they feel comfortable with. "I could make some good pies or cider with those windfalls," they say under their breath as they suppress the fist they want to shake skyward. And then you imagine the poor and the strangers, hoping and praying for wind, knowing that wind--strong wind--may be the only way the owners are bound to part with their fruit. It would be best if owners didn't need the wind as the gauge for whether they ought to share with the poor and the stranger. But this is where we get the figurative definition of windfall, permitting someone to scrimp by on (as the 1801 sentence says) windfalls of toothpick cases and loose silver.

No doubt I'm talking about much more than fruit, and the literal practice of gleaning has fallen by the wayside in a lot of places. Good thing no gleaners came by the pawpaw trees yesterday evening before I had picked up the windfall. A green pawpaw is inedible, and I imagine poisonous (at least, if the leaves and bark are any indication). Whereas a fallen apple may be good for nothing but the cider heap, this fallen pawpaw (fallen about a month and a half before its time) was good for nothing but dissecting at the kitchen table.

I smelled the windfall after I opened it, and it had almost nothing that resembled the smell of a ripe pawpaw, except for a vague yeasty smell that is present but not prominent in a ripe pawpaw.

I was interested to see the seeds, so brown-black in a ripe pawpaw. And here they're white or pale yellow. And one of them was cut in half during the dissection.

I gravitated toward the dissected seed, since its innards looked so gelatinous, yet there was a structure to its innards, as if it were some type of insect egg or alien cocoon.