Shenandoah Pawpaws Ripe!

You'll recognize this pic from my previous post: two twin clusters of Shenandoah pawpaws...

...displaying their fault lines, getting ready to fall. That was the state of things just last night. And last night I went to sleep thinking about raccoons and skunks prowling the neighborhood, opportunistically eating unattended pawpaws.

But last night is history.

This morning I went outside thinking I would pick a couple fruits from this set of two twin clusters, wanting NJ to be able to eat one before her upcoming business trip to Brazil. But the pawpaws saved me the work of picking: "And finally the broken stem / The plummeting to earth; and then..."

Here they are, as they were, having plummeted to earth "sometime while the night obscures the tree." 

They left the other set of twins hanging.

The broken stem.

Recording the harvest date for our first two Shenandoah pawpaws.

Putting the pawpaw harvest tracking chart back behind the woven bamboo fan.

A few quotes from this post are taken from Tennessee Williams's 1961 play The Night of the Iguana, which at one point has a character recite a poem about fruit falling from a tree, beginning with: "How calmly does the orange branch / Observe the sky begin to blanch." Here's the entire poem, with the surrounding dialogue and stage directions:

It's worth your four minutes to watch this poetry reading as it appeared in the 1964 film version of the play.