Fig blip 2022

Some have already been consumed and this one is on the verge. (The orange cord is holding up the branches which get very heavy when the  fruit are ripe.)

I usually blip fligs in some form around this time in the summer. I've just checked and there seem to be at least fifteen in not-quite12 years of blipping. Which goes to show how fond I am of them and how glad I am I planted this tree over 25 years ago. 
(My first attempt to pick a ripe fig was in an Oxford college and I was sternly reprimanded before I had detached it: they all belonged to the Master.)

That figs mean a lot more than just fruit is conveyed by this poem by the daughter of a Palestinian refugee.

My Father and the Fig Tree 

For other fruits, my father was indifferent.
He'd point at the cherry trees and say, 
"See those? I wish they were figs." 
In the evening he sat by my bed 
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves. 
They always involved a figtree.
Even when it didn't fit, he'd stick it in. 
Once Joha was walking down the road and he saw a fig tree.
Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree 
and went to sleep. 
Or, later when they caught and arrested him, 
his pockets were full of figs.

 At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
 "That's not what I'm talking about! he said, 
"I'm talking about a fig straight from the earth 
– gift of Allah! -- on a branch so heavy 
it touches the ground. 

I'm talking about picking the largest, fattest, 
sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth
(Here he'd stop and close his eyes.)

Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had figtrees.
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
"Plant one!" my mother said. 
but my father never did. 
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
"What a dreamer he is. Look how many
things he starts and doesn't finish." 

The last time he moved, I got a phone call, 
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song 
I'd never heard. "What's that?" 
He took me out back to the new yard. 
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas, 
a tree with the largest, fattest, sweetest fig in the world.
"It's a figtree song!" he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance 
of a world
that was always his own. 


From
 19 VARIETIES OF GAZELLE by Naomi Shihab Nye