The Pawpaw Patch

Have you ever eaten a pawpaw? They're delicious. The ones in the picture are still green, but when they're ripe they turn a yellowish color. The taste is banana-like, only different. There's really nothing that tastes exactly like a pawpaw, so if you've never eaten one, it's kinda hard to describe. The pulp is banana-like also, only mushier when ripe, and all the seeds are in the center of the fruit.

You won't find pawpaws in the grocery. They don't ship well and definitely don't keep long enough to stock. So they have no real commercial value. When I was a kid, they grew wild all over the hills in this area. We used to go into the woods and collect buckets of them. They get huge and can weigh up to a pound. But something happened to the trees. They caught a blight or something and all but disappeared. I haven't seen a pawpaw in many years.

But guess what. We now have five trees growing in our yard. At least I hope they'll be growing in our yard. Right now, they look like twigs sticking in the ground with a tiny bit of green growth sprouting from them. They don't transplant very well, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they survive. My mother-in-law had some seeds a couple of years ago and tossed them into her flower bed. They sprouted and grew.

For the past couple of days, hubby and I have been enjoying this hot, gorgeous weather by working in the yard. We have flowers and blooming shrubs everywhere. We've also planted a few vegetables. Early this morning, hubby went to the flea market and found a treasure. It's a push broom with a hollow handle and you can attach a water hose to the end of it. That way, water continuously flows from the brush. Sounds ridiculous, but hubby was in Hog Heaven applying this thing to his garage floor. The man mops the garage. Yes, the floor is painted and he tries to keep it as clean as the floors inside the house, which is just silly, in my opinion. It's a garage. It's technically outdoors--if you open up the doors. Yet hubby insists on obsessing over the garage floor. So sweep and mop he does, and I don't say anything anymore, I just let him knock himself out. A clean garage floor seems to make him happy. So he used this push broom with water flowing from it, and some liquid detergent, and scrubbed it down good. Then he used his giant squeegee (the thing's 3 ft. wide) to get rid of the water by scraping it all toward the drain in the middle of the floor.

Okay, enough about squeegees and pawpaws. Tomorrow, something about writing, or at least something writing related.

Devon