Harvesting Persimmons

A typical Korean countryside autumn scene is that of bright orange persimmons (감) hanging alone from the branches of a persimmon tree (감나무), the leaves of which have already fallen. Fall is also the time to pick the persimmons and eat them, leave them to ripen, or string them together vertically and leave them hanging to dry. Unlike with an apple tree, however, it's not a good idea to climb a 감나무 to try to pick the persimmons - its branches are too brittle. In fact, an old Korean saying or joke upon seeing a child who has broken his arm is to ask if he was climbing a persimmon tree. So how do you get to the persimmons that are so way up high?

I suppose you could just move around a very tall ladder and pick them by hand. But because the branches are so brittle, you can extend your reach and break a branch off for yourself with a simple tool like this:

To break the branch, you just catch it in the nook and twist.
Now, recently my mom came to visit from Oregon and took me to her friends' country home, which is where I took these pictures. One of the first things I did when I got there was to learn how to pick persimmons from their tree since they had so many to harvest. But rather than climbing a ladder with a sack and using the branch-breaking stick, I learned to use a much niftier device that works on the same principle. It looks like this:

So you can see that this is a stick with a sling-shot shape that has a very ratty looking bag hanging from it. This stick is tied to a very long piece of bamboo, which has the advantage of being relatively light and very sturdy. To use this - and this is the fun part - you lift up the stick and enclose a persimmon in the bag from the bottom. Then you push the stick forward and up until the twig that is holding the persimmon is right in the nook of the V shape, the persimmon right under it. There has to be tension between the bamboo stick and the tree for this to work. When you twist the bamboo (and sometimes you have to twist a couple times), the twig breaks and the persimmon plops right into the bag. Like so:

This may seem like a strange post, but for some reason, this was one of my most satisfying and even relaxing experiences in Korea. It's very simple and easy, but it takes some degree of attention and a little skill to guide the stick up past the lower branches and to get it situated right in relation to the persimmons you're trying to get in order for the twisting to work. I liked the simple ingenuity of the tool - which is just a branch, a piece of bamboo, and some cloth and string - and the actual sensed experience of picking fruit this way: the snap of the twig and the increase of weight in your hands as the persimmon(s) fall into the bag fifteen feet up in the air from you, the balancing act of lowering it to the ground while moving your hands under each other to bring the other end of the stick closer so you don't have to walk as far to pick the fruit out of the damp bag, the sounds of the branches and persimmons that sometimes fall unintentionally, the holding of each success in your hand, watching the pile of fruit grow. It could make for another good persimmon-related poem for someone more poetically ambitious than I. It also probably helped my experience that I wasn't really obligated to do any of this work, only as much as I wanted, and that on the day I did most of the picking (unlike when I took these photos, the next day) the weather was great and the persimmons were brighter against the backdrop of a clear blue sky.

a poem

Yesterday my uncle and I went to the house of a friend of his that I've seen a few times and really like. His name is Mr. Pak, but we usually refer to him as the Tin Man because of the role he played in a performance they and two pastors put together as part of a yearly community gathering (guess who played Dorothy?). Although he lives near the third biggest metropolis on the globe, he managed to find a neighborhood that feels like the country. He lives there with his wife and son in a traditional style Korean house. They have a small garden around the edges of the house and a small persimmon tree near the gate. He likes to drink country rice-wine and can play the traditional Korean bamboo flute, which along with the following earned him the additional pseudonym "dionysus plays the flute" on my uncle's phone: he has read a lot of and is grateful to Nietzsche. His specialty, however, is James Joyce, on whom he wrote a dissertation (in English!) even longer (and probably better written) than my thesis. He and my uncle like to get together to hike or, more often, to play guitar and sing. Yesterday he kindly translated a verse of a song he had just sung into English so I could get a sense of how beautiful and poetic he felt it to be, and he asked me if I had written any poems. As we were leaving the two of us waited by the persimmon tree for my uncle to come back out and I told him that persimmons reminded me of a poem of that title I once read for a class. He said he would like to read it, so I looked it up at home and figured I might as well share it as an easy post. Before we left, though, he reached into the tree and broke off a bit of branch for me to take home. It has two persimmons on it. I'd never held a persimmon before that save for one other time, the summer after I took that poetry class, when someone sent me one in the mail.

The poet is Li-Young Lee. Enjoy.

My only reservation about persimmons, though, is that they can look suspiciously similar to tomatoes...
(painting by Elizabeth Brandon)