Sweet Persimmons Bring Back Memories

The bountiful persimmon harvest from the tree in my back yard this year has made me grateful for the place where I live and has helped me to reflect on the tree’s meaning to me and my family. When I taste the sweet fruit that has come from the earth beside me, it reminds me of living here together with my mother-in-law almost forty years ago. The persimmon tree and other plants in my garden, still owe their energy to her careful tending of their environment.

At the beginning her methods were baffling to me. Her system was to use everything. In the kitchen after a meal it wasn’t just a simple washing up of the dishes and throwing out the trash. No, in fact there was almost no trash at all. First there was the dividing of the plates. Those with oil on them when into one water bucket to soak. Others went into another pan. The soaking water from washing rice was also saved. All this water was then poured on to the roots of certain plants in the garden; not down the drain! Food waste was taken out and buried in the ground. Those minerals have certainly made the persimmons sweet for the ages!

Back in the kitchen, eggshells piled up in the corner above the sink covered in cobwebs. I always had the urge to throw them out. But mother-in-law put them around certain plants, or used them to wash hard to clean bottles and the like. I now appreciate her cleverness.

We also had no paper trash. As a new bride, fresh from an America that loved to throw things away in giant trashcans, I had no idea what was in store for me. The house had no hot water. We made our own hot tub every night with trash. I learned to sit outside every night for forty minutes and feed sticks, paper and pieces of wood left from the razing of grandma’s house next door, to warm up the huge iron pot bath: Goemonburo. It wasn’t so lonely because I could listen to the transistor radio, but the winter winds and mosquitoes on a damp summer night made it uncomfortable from time to time. I now wonder, how did I have time to do that?

When we ate the persimmons with mother-in-law, I remember she always kept the peels. She would mix them with the white cabbage pickles to add a little sweetness with the salty flavor. As we sat with out legs curled under the “kotatsu”(table heater), I remember laughing at my winter wardrobe from America with its sleeveless woolen dresses. They never again saw the light of day. In my mother-in-law’s house, my winter wear was “polar bear”: heavy cotton padded jackets from November to March.

With mother-in-law, we always drank tea from a chipped teapot. My upbringing had been one where we had hidden or gotten rid of chipped plates as unsightly. So, I found the exact same pot in a neighborhood store and bought her a new one. However, she just put the new one in the cupboard saying with a smile that she would save it until the chipped pot was no longer useable. Thanks to that encounter, I continue to use chipped dishes to this day.

She introduced me, too, to slow cooking. Mother-in-law’s “gomadofu”(sesame tofu), tediously made by hand, was the best in the world. So, too, was the “konbu”(kelp) cooked for several hours. Her corn soup came from taking off each kernel from the cob. I still have notes from our first New Year’s food preparations when she passed down family recipes that keep you in the kitchen for three days. I offered to make one holiday dish, but was ashamed that the pumpkin for the pie came from a can.

With all this talk these days of protecting the environment and of what we need to do to change our lifestyles, it is clear to me that all this wisdom was here all along. And when the ripe fruit hangs heavy on the branches of my persimmon tree, I am reminded that even little things can makes a difference. No, I’m not going back to the Goemonburo bath, but sharing the soaking water with my plants will be a start. Also, I’ll try to find more uses for those persimmon peels!