A New Image for Expatriate Pawpaw

This pic is the one I've been using for the cover image of Expatriate Pawpaw since August 2015.  But this year I got an email from a student at a nearby university and he was wondering if I would trade a pawpaw for something, maybe some acorns that had been boiled several times. But then he said that even after boiling, they still weren't very good. I wasn't surprised to hear this, since I myself once tried boiling a bunch of acorns several times, unsuccessfully hoping to drive away their astringency. Based on that experience, I would have given him a pawpaw for not giving me any acorns. But what I admire about his acorn gambit is that we're an elite few in the twenty-first century who have been dedicated enough to eating unconventional plant-matter that we've even tried boiling acorns. So in the end, he had me at "boiled acorns," and we simply agreed to meet and I handed him the pawpaw, which he carried home, by his own report, "like it was the last egg for some endangered species." He ate it this morning, reporting by email: "It definitely had a tropical taste, but I'm thinking it might not have been the best one because I had read some descriptions of it as a mango/banana, which are both pretty sweet, but it was pretty mild (sweeter than an avocado, but in the same realm)." He's right--I bet it wasn't the best. I gave him a Shenandoah pawpaw, and though usually this is my favorite cultivar, this year it's producing a handful of insipid pawpaws along side its normal fruit fireworks. (We ate two small insipid pawpaws and one roman candle pawpaw this evening, for instance.) 

In return for the pawpaw, sub-par though it may have been, he emailed me a design, which he was too politick to suggested I ought to use as the front page image for my blog, but which was so clearly based on the former front page image that I couldn't help but think that I definitely should. So with his permission, I'm now using it, and very happy about it. I'm hoping to give him a better pawpaw later this month.