He found them by reaching. That is how you find the first figs of the season not by looking but by putting your hand into the green and trusting that what belongs to this time of year will be there. His fingers closed around one. Small, hard, still more green than ripe. He leaned in close and smelled it before he picked it.
This is what the wild fig smells like in late May: something between grass and honey and the inside of an old jar that once held something sweet. It is not the smell of summer yet. It is the promise of it which is its own thing, sharper and more fleeting, and in some ways better.
II. They filled the bowl slowly. This is not a harvest that rushes the wild figs are small and scattered and each one asks to be chosen individually, held for a moment, decided on. He was good at this. He has always been good at the kind of attention that looks, from the outside, like stillness but is in fact the opposite a complete and focused presence, every sense directed at the thing in front of him.
The striped cloth was spread on the table under the tree the way it always is on days like this not set for a meal exactly, more like prepared for whatever the morning decides to become. It has been on this table, in this garden, more times than anyone has counted. The red lines running through the linen have faded slightly at the edges, the way things do when they are truly used, when they belong to a life rather than a shelf.
He arranged four figs on the plate. Looked at them. Added one more.
III. At some point he walked to the far end of the property, where the grandfather’s small wooden shed stands at the edge of the field. He does not go inside the tools in there have their own order, the grandfather’s order, and that is not something you disturb. But he stands in front of it sometimes. Looks at the door.
The shed holds everything the land requires the things that cut and dig and carry, the things that have been repaired so many times they are more repair than original, the things that will outlast all of us because they are made for exactly one purpose and they fulfil it without complaint. There is something in that kind of faithfulness that a child understands intuitively, even if he cannot name it yet.
The wheat in the field behind him had gone golden already. May turning to June. The shed standing as it always stands patient, full, waiting for the hands that know how to use what’s inside.
IV. The figs on the branch were the ones not yet ready another week, maybe two. He looked at them with the patience of someone who has learned that wanting something sooner does not make it arrive sooner. The land has its own schedule. You adjust to it, not the other way around.
He held three in his open palms and looked at them the way he looks at things he is trying to memorise not the appearance, but the weight, the temperature, the particular way this thing feels on this morning in this garden. He is building an archive that has no index, no order, no system. Just accumulated knowledge stored somewhere below language, waiting for the moments when it will be needed.
These figs will become glyko tou koutaliou the spoon sweet his grandmother makes every year from the first wild harvest, cooked slowly with sugar until they are amber and syrup-thick and taste of everything this season was before the summer took over. He knows this. He is waiting for that too.
V. He sat at the table in the late morning with the bowl of figs in front of him and his chin in his hand and that look he gets when he has stopped doing and started thinking or stopped thinking and started feeling, which in him amounts to the same thing. He was not sad. He was not happy in any demonstrative way. He was simply present, in the garden, at the end of May, with the figs and the old table and the striped cloth and the light coming through the fig leaves above him in the way that fig leaves let light through in pieces, in patterns, never all at once.
The candle had been burning since morning. Chamomile and wild fig the smell of this garden distilled into something you could carry with you, something you could light in December when the fig tree is bare and the garden is quiet and you need to remember what late May felt like. That is what a good candle does. It does not decorate a room. It holds a memory open.
He picked up the last fig. Turned it in his fingers. Put it back.
Some things are better left where they are.
Credits
Photography & Art Direction Growing Creative Sprouts
Location Northern Greece, Late May
The wild fig tree our land.
From our collection
Minted Fig candle. Chamomile & wild fig. Available in the shop.
Rustic Red striped linen tablecloth. Available in the shop.
