Halloween and Final Pawpaws

Halloween was the day we harvested the final three pawpaws of 2017. Here's the stately Shenandoah with its final pawpaw.

See here's the pawpaw.

It so happens that NJ's costume, which remade her as a pawpaw-leaf-adorned dryad, positioned her as Halloween's anointed pawpaw harvester.

She reached out and took hold of the Shenandoah's final fruit.

And then she contemplated the sweet and poignant scent of the closing this phase of the circle of life.

And contemplated.

And still contemplated.


I felt bad, needing to break her reverie, but we had more harvesting to do before we headed off to eat some scones at a neighbor house. So I went ahead and interrupted, reminding her that the KSU-Atwood stood waiting nearby...

She was a good sport about having her meditation interrupted and walked over and did the work of harvesting the final two Atwood pawpaws, which had actually turned kind of purple or brown on the branch.

Then, all over again, it was contemplation of the circle of life and its sweet and poignant scent.

After half an hour I was able to convince her to wipe the tears from her eyes and let's us go and get some scones already.

Over at our neighbors' house, where the scones were, NJ bumped into another autumn dryad, a good friend of ours.

Back home that night, I labeled the final three pawpaws and recorded them on the pawpaw harvest tracking chart.