Harvest Day

The macadamia nut doesn't yield without a fight. The tree's leaves have tiny barbs that prick exposed skin. A ladder must be scaled to pluck a single fruit. The green husk needs to dry out before it can be removed. The shell withstands direct blows with a hammer, and hand-held crackers are useless. A levered nutcracker mounted on a flat surface is the only way.

I compete with several species for the essential nutrients. Birds carry away some, and rats and squirrels climb the tree and steal away with others. All the while, crawling insects with oval red backs painstakingly bore into the shell, whether the nut has fallen or not.

I occupied this little plot of earth for nearly three years before realizing I shared it with a macadamia nut tree, a figurative tree of life.

How many of us stumble around on this rock, not noticing the fruit all around us?

How much have I missed while shuffling around inside this coil? About a year ago, an arborist named Joseph came to help manage our trees. He showed me how to trim dead limbs without injuring the trees. Then he took a walk around the grounds, to inspect our other trees.

"You have a carob tree 'round back."

Huh. We thought that it was an oak tree that kept dropping those pods. And I always thought carob was that fake chocolate that they put in the trail mix.

Carob is also known as St. John's Bread. Carob was eaten by ancient Egyptians, and the pod is used in the Egyptian hieroglyph to signify "sweet," or nedjem.

Carob is sometimes called St. John's Bread because it is thought that the "locusts" that John the Baptist ate in the wilderness may have been carob.

The Greek word for carob seed, kerátion, is the indirect root for the word "carat," which we use today to measure gemstone mass and gold purity.

Forty years ago, or so, a thoughtful man planted a little tree there, and it bears fruit, even as generations pass one to another.