I’m not sure what you were thinking

Anna Lowe Weber

buying blueberries so early in spring.
The sun has only barely begun come out of hiding,
and here you are, returning home in triumph from
the grocery with bags full of avocados, hard as rocks
in their alligator skin, strawberries such a washed out,
tired red, I find them depressing to look at,
much less consume. Why not just buy
a watermelon while you’re at it? But you
don’t understand my frustration, insist that
we live in an age of seasonless crops, where pineapples
and butternut squash, grown and harvested thousands
of miles away, cohabitate in the produce section.
And you’re right, I suppose. But consider
a peach in April, and again in July. Tell me
it’s not worth the patience then, the wait
for the ripening. Honeyed juices uncontainable
after the first bite; golden flesh giving way
to pinks and crimsons as a quieting sun does.
How could a sad, April peach be equated
to such a jewel?

But I make you eat them anyway—the peaches
you’ve brought home in April. You insist they aren’t that bad—
decent, even. Sitting on the back porch together
on one of spring’s first warm days, I watch as you crunch
your way through the pale, yellow thing. I guess
none of us really knows what life with another person
will be like until you’re years in— too far out to shift,
reroute. Too far out to change the course now.
Better just to accept them for their flaws. To sit
until they’ve finished the fruit. To offer a napkin—
unnecessary though it is, seeing as there was no juice.