As the barley dries and turns golden in the fields, the apricots in the branches above grow soft and sweet and ready. This spring snow fell when the blossoms were on the trees in the village, and the Tarpa all said that there wasn’t much fruit– but to our foreign eyes the abundance that poured down out of the trees was a wonder.
Fruits fell, and we ate them, picking them up from along the pathways and water canals. We helped grandmothers gather them in buckets and tsepo to be split open, pitted, and set on rooftops to dry. Fruits are precious, but less precious than seeds; tsigu, apricot kernels, are carefully sorted, washed, and stored, to crack and press into oil in the wintertime. Some trees bear sweet seeds, like tiny almonds but still more delicious. Meme Angchuk told us that they used to press these sweet seeds too, and mix the oil with barley flour to eat on special occasions. “Now people sell them,” he said, bemused, resigned.
Apricot trees grow everywhere, it seems, that a tree could possibly be planted: lining fields and water canals, ancient thick branches stretching high above houses, young saplings in nurseries barricaded against cows. Across the stream from our house in the upper village, Konchok’s grandfather and uncle Sonam made terraces and planted more than fifty trees. Nearly half of them are laktse karpo, a special white-shelled variety only found in Ladakh, sweeter than tiny peaches. Meme Angchuk remembers grafting them as a young man, forty years ago. The trees flowered a little later in the upper village, and the fruit set there was a full as we could imagine.
The chuli in our orchard ripened first, fruits mild or sour or mealy or gently sweet. We dried some but many went to make fruit leather for cows for the winter, or into a great fermenting pot we plan to distill.
Next a small tree on the first terrace began to drop, hundreds of red-blushing fruits falling over just a few days. Also chuli, with bitter seeds, drying like sweet-sour candies. Around that time too, the first laktse karpo ripened and fell, tasting like honey and flowers.
Jason went to Changthang after the barley harvest was complete in Tar, and I stayed home and tended apricots. I woke each morning and crossed the water as first sun lit orange on high cliffs to gather bowls full of fruit fallen in the night. Sometimes I shook the trees gently, like knocking on a door, and an orange-gold rain of sweetness would fall all around me.
It’s a good time of year for grazing in the upper village, and villagers would bring their cows up mid-morning. If apricots still lay on the ground (it only happened once) they were swiftly devoured, becoming cows, becoming milk. I tried to be assiduous, gathering every day in good time, laying fruits to dry on the roof before going down to the village for the day’s work.
We spend so much time beneath these trees in the winter and early spring, but coming to them in this way, receiving their gifts, is a wholly different kind of intimacy. I came to know each one by variety and taste as well as form, by the way light hit the fruits among the leaves newly every morning. It brought maple syruping to mind: visiting each tree each day, receiving their sweetness.
Apricots ripened into full flush, and Konchok brought the cows up to the stable in the gongma. He came up each morning to care for them, and then we went to the orchard together. He shook down apricots from all the trees, beating branches with long willow poles; we filled heavy buckets and baskets for him to carry down to the village each evening. After three days of harvesting like this, the trees were growing bare again. We drank black tea with delicious fresh milk each afternoon in the shade of our outdoor kitchen, praising the cows and their beauty.
The harvest moon waned; by new moon, only a few fruits still hung on the trees, half-eaten by traveling birds on their way over the Himalayas. We heard their unfamiliar songs in the branches, saw bright quick glimpses of strange feathers, wished them good nourishment and health as they migrated on. Our rooftop is full, plenty to keep us through the long winter. How are we so fortunate to live in receipt of the unnameable, unearned generosity of trees?
In Maine on a recent bike ride and at home I’ve seen grey squirrels and chipmunks with cheeks bulging carrying red oak acorns I assume for storage. You mention migrating birds helping themselves to the apricot abundance in Tar. Do you have resident birds and mammals that you “share” the harvest with? How safe are your roof top drying apricots from mammals or birds?