First Pomagranate of the Season

picture by my good friend Rachel, featuring the hands of my other good friend Jaqui.

Usually I don't get the year's first poemgranate until winter-- somewhere near Christmas when they show up at Wal-Mart and other such cheap and publicly-accessible stores. But because of the Farmer's Market mentioned before, I got to have a wedge of a lovely shiny-red pom for breakfast. They're messy to open and kind of a pain to eat if you don't chomp the seeds (which I don't because I think they're too hard to chomp and bitter and clash with the tenderness of the fruit, as well as leaving nothing for me to plant), but they're so tasty and so... what's the word I'm looking for here? Histoical? Loaded with centuries? It's the sense that they've been around for almost as long as people have, the knowledge that they were common in the first civilizations man inhabited, the idea that they're sacred to Goddesses in the old stories that tell of the turning of the seasons...

I think not in straight lines but in clouds of ideas and references, and pomegranates, perfect and shiny and so loaded with little rubies, are more surrounded by ideas then most things, and the first one I get to eat of the year is like a sacrament-- it's absorbing the fall that fell when Persephony went underground and ate the same seeds as me, it's remembering all the times we sat around campfires eating poms and drinking tea brewed on an open flame, it's hoping the spring will come and it's enjoying the coming winter. I'm early this year, but it's still the same, and it's still wonderful, and I love them.

As soon as these seeds are dry enough not to rot, I'm trying again to sprout viable seedlings so I can still have poms when the food system collapses entirely.