My father left Kappadocia in the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece in 1922. He was only eleven years old at the time and his recollections from the village became bedtime stories for his children at a tender age. Thus some stories I have absorbed as if I were present when they happened, feeling the angst and the pain, and sometimes the pleasure. This is a pleasant recollection of the fruit garden they had with apple and pear trees and one big walnut tree to which about 16 families had a right by inheritance to share in the produce. He remembered walking early in the morning in this garden when the pears were ripening, and the pleasure he would feel when one of them would be ripe enough to fall down with a "plop" sound, and how good it tasted. I can still hear this vicarious plop.

Thus, when in retirement he found himself the owner of a plot that had olive trees and one wild pear tree, he arranged to graft it for edible pears. The tree thrived. Its large branches grew over the veranda with a welcome shade in the hot summer. In spring it blossomed into white flowers, like a bride. Unfortunately, the numerous fruit attracted those beautiful green scarab beetles in droves. They laid their eggs, and soon the pears fell with a plop, because they had become overripe and full of maggots. There was then the chore of cleaning these kilos upon kilos of yucky plops and taking them to the compost heap. Just before he got his first serious illness, serious enough to put him out of action for six months, he decided to cut off this tree. He attacked it with a vengeance with his hand saw and left only the stump to be finished with a power saw.

It was six months later when we were able to visit the cottage again, and it was spring. The stump had vigorously put forth big branches, which, amazingly, were all pointing down instead of going up. It looked like a weeping willow. It had decided in its tree brain that “up” was dangerous. In the next years it slowly lifted these branches in the correct direction, and, not being attacked again since my father did not feel up to it, it regained its thick umbrella shadow and multitude of plopping defective pears.

Some time after my father left us, I read that one should cut the pears while still green before the beetle attacks, wrap them in newspaper and let them ripen in the basement.