ONE PERSIMMON

Harvests all in, fields a golden-brown stubble spiked with green as the days edge into Autumn, skies a blue only leafless trees can bear, leaves gone earliest from the persimmon trees till just the orange balloons of fruit cluster up there in the blue intensity like amber in turquoise, fruit that stays on the tree for the birds to eat throughout the winter (beautiful on country winter days, with its own blue of sky, are those stark brown trees with their arms full of persimmons in the sun when all else is white or dark on the earth).

But the old country folks still eat persimmons too. Late this afternoon as the day headed toward its close I was walking up the road and passed by an elderly man dressed in brown like the fields and the leaves, both hands full of the gold of the large persimmon he'd picked from his tree; he stood there eating it by the roadside, his mouth full of the same goldenness, savoring that juicy sweetness you lose the taste for if you're jaded by factory sweets, on his face a look of pleasure surpassing any description of happiness, and he was only halfway through! What a sight he was, beside a country road in the sunlight of an Autumn afternoon, lost in ageless joy. Who can have more than that?