STICKY FINGERS

This is the season of the rotting fruit.
Huge generous piles of rotting fruit.
With wasps and worms.


At this time of year the trees in Brabant are losing their leaves, the air in the woods outside of Valkenswaard is rich with tannin from the oaks, and the breeze carries sharp rotten-moss odours from the pines. Briny, moldy, moist. The air is cold.

As it was then.

Earlier in those autumns, when the weather was still warm and sunlight lasted longer, we would climb over the walls of other people's gardens and steal the unripe apples, sour and crunchy and too small to bother plucking. In some orchards an apricot would still hang on a branch, dangling over long grass that hid it's darkened kin. We feasted on our stolen treasures, and came home late with no appetite for dinner.


When the frosts hit in late October even the apples lost their tempting qualities. The grass underneath the trees would be wet and filled with rotting things. A late wasp would sluggishly rise to threaten, something black and horny would disappear among the soggy lumps and leaves. Our fingers no longer snatched and but stayed inside our pockets. The cold wind escorted in the early twilight and the long chill dusk, which did not darken with a golden glow, but in a faded silver that settled into umbers and slate greys.


The Smeets family had had several apple trees and a few pears in their long, long yard. The fruit would start ripening in late summer, and the passage through the hedge-row would then have to be rediscovered and surreptitiously re-widened, in preparation for raids. Their fruit was small and crisp, but incredible juicy - our chins and hands testified to our crimes. We were quick, we were silent.

The Smeets children were just as bad as everybody else in other yards. While we gorged on their green apples, they ate stolen red stars in old man Driessen's garden.

There were so many fruit trees in the neighborhood that everyone lost and everyone won.

The grown-ups did this too. There is nothing quite so suspicious as the stern voice of adult authority, with bulging pockets and bumpy clothes. People wearing ill-fitting garments that you had never seen them in before acting surprised, out of place, and grumpy. The twig in the hair and the leaves stuck in the collar were, in hindsight, odd.


I did not notice it happening, but as I grew older, more and more of the trees disappeared. By the time I started smoking there were only a few left. Our big apple tree in the courtyard, an apricot tree three gardens over, and some berry bushes along the road. The Smeets only had the pear trees left. And the smells had changed. Gardens had been cleared, people had moved away. What had once been called the stink path was now an actual road - paved, lit, besidewalked, straightened out and made civilized. The house where 'Steel Jesus' lived with his dear little wife from the Indies was no longer there. Their cherry trees, the peaches and plums, and the apple trees were gone. A parking lot marks the spot. A very neat little parking lot, with shiny street lamps. Very bright and cheerful.

Angry house-harridans do not yell at shadows flitting through the trees, guard-dogs no longer sociably slobber into fruit-stained faces.
Does anyone even still steal fruit in this age?

Someone should invent a video-game.


I think I'll let some apples rot in the kitchen over the next few days to reawaken memories.
This will be fun.