New Essay ~ Alligator Pear

 

Last summer I grew an avocado jungle on my deck. 

The previous fall, with school operating on a hybrid schedule and the pandemic unfurling before us toward what seemed like eternity, one of my sons asked if we could start an avocado tree from a pit. Eager for any of my children to show interest in anything that wasn't screen based, I jumped on the idea. I remembered my mom starting avocado trees by piercing pits with toothpicks and suspending them in water in a green depression glass sherbet dish. I didn't have a depression glass sherbet dish, so I used an empty yogurt container, and I didn't have any toothpicks, so I used party picks with paper Pinocchio heads on one end that my mother-in-law had given us for no apparent reason. Otherwise, my sprouting avocado looked exactly like my mom's.

Read the rest of "Alligator Pear" in the Flora issue of Stonecrop Review here.

And if you want to order a copy of my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail, you can get it half off from Bison Books through July 15, 2022 with the code 6SUMM22.