Kim Nelson Writes

Love Affairs. They’ve been in my dreams, in my work, on my mind. As I’ve told you before, I love LOVE. I’m all about it. And right now, there’s so much to love. Like my garden.

Yesterday The Good Husband and I spent hours in the garden cleaning, preening, trimming and skimming. We wore our swimsuits and hopped in the pool to cool. Gentle breezes rustled mesquite beans from their branches and clouds spread themselves thinly between the bright desert sun and us. Rain would come. Lovely!

In the Mission Garden I ate several late strawberries, trimmed back the mint (I have more than a dozen varieties), and harvested a lovely cache of figs. FIGS! Now there’s a fruit that’s inspired lots of love. And is it ever revered. Historically, the fig tree’s been considered sacred in all parts of Southwestern Asia, Egypt, Greece, and Italy. And now, of course, in Tucson.

Pliny The Elder, the noted Roman writer and natural philosopher, said “Figs are restorative. They increase the strength of young people, preserve the elderly in better health and make them look younger with fewer wrinkles.”

Bring on the figs!

Figs symbolize abundance, fertility, sweetness. Like a ripe and ready, fecund woman. The most mentioned fruits in the bible, figs also played key roles in ancient tales of love and seduction. Not surprising. Figs are sexy. Consider the words used to describe figs… Fleshy, Luscious, Rosy, Satiny, Smooth, Succulent. You get the picture.

Figs. I love them. Have I made you think twice? If so, take a look at some of mine:

Inspiration:

The Fig

by Gabriela Mistral, as translated from the Spanish by Maria Jacketti

Touch me: it is softness of good satin, and when you open me, what an unexpected rose! Do you not remember some king’s black cloak under which a redness burned?

I bloom inside myself to enjoy myself with an inward gaze, scarcely for a week.

Afterward, the satin opens generously in a great fold of Congolese laughter.

Poets have not know the color of night, nor the figs of Palestine. We are both the most ancient blue, a passionate blue, richly concentrating itself because of its ardor.

I spill my pressed flowers into your hand. I create a deaf meadow for your pleasure. I shower you with the meadow’s bouquet until covering your feet. No. I keep the flowers tied – they make me itch; the resting rose also knows this sensation.

I am also the pulp of the Rose-of-Sharon, bruised.

Allow my praise to be made: I nourished the Greeks, and they have praised me less than Juno, who gave them nothing.