Sunday, June 14, 2009

in our backyard, we have 3 apricot trees. After taunting me with hard green fruit for-fucking-ever, one of the trees has begun to ripen. Apricots aren't even something I usually consider at the grocery store, but these are some spectacular pieces of fruit - seriously, they're delicious and the first couple days we started plucking them, we hardly got any into the house because we were eating them straight off the tree.

The ones we could reach had already been picked, but there were way more ripe ones waiting to be nommed, but not being a tree-climber, I couldn't figure out what to do. Finally I got the brilliant idea of giving the branches a good hard shake to dislodge the fruit (I saw a Food Network show where they did that with pecan trees) - it's great, grab a branch, jiggle it a little and hope you don't get bonked on the head.

In addition to being a great way to get fruit out of trees, this is also a spectacular way to piss off bees. I'm officially a genius.

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The other day, I'm in the middle of dyeing my hair when there's a knock at the door - I open the door and see the neighbor from across the street... well, she's not even really our neighbor anymore since her parents decided that their house was no longer worth what they paid for it, so they stopped making payments and got foreclosed upon. They've been moving out for 3 weeks.

We make small talk about hair dye and she's being all friendly and nice, which, in itself is odd since in the 4 months that we've lived across from each other, she's never made any effort to speak to me. Then she asks if she can have some apricots. She says something about how the people who lived in our house previously used to give her apricots all the time and how she loves them so much, blah blah blah. I tell her that only one of the trees is ripe so far and we don't have any today, she asks if I'm watering them, and tells me that I really need to get to them before the birds, blah blah blah, then she says "I can just go pick some if you want, we used to do that when the Millers lived here."

Sure, lady I've never spoken to before, head into my backyard and harvest yourself some fruit, why don't you?

I reitterate to her that there aren't any ripe ones today, but tell her that if she wants to swing back by tomorrow, I'll grab some for her. She pushes for the picking thing again and I tell her that the dogs are in the yard (not a lie, but it's not like they'd do anything to her) and just ask her to come back another day.

That was 3 days ago, I've got about 20 in a bag for her and she hasn't come back. If she doesn't come get them by tomorrow, I'm making jam, fuck her.

Am I rude for not inviting her into my yard to pick her own fruit? She seemed a little taken aback that I didn't hand her a basket and throw open the back gate for her.