I’ve been learning to love persimmons this fall.

I’ve been buying them at the farmer’s market each week and feeling sort of exotic every time I eat one.  They’re everywhere here—hanging (rotting) on trees on nearly every block.  So why exotic?  I don’t know.

This week I sliced into one and found my very first seed.  You know how there’s those moments, those flashes of something special, when time slows down and attentiveness ramps up, and you really notice something?  Deeply notice it?  Call me crazy, but that’s what happened with this seed.  I felt like I had struck gold.  The last egg on an Easter egg hunt when you thought they all were found.  I pulled it from its bed and just looked at it, so smooth, so dear.  I thought of baby skin, and lambs ears, and the eyes of kittens a few months old.  I thought of Elijah’s face when he smiles at me, the whole thing bright and clear and free.

I set that seed on the counter and watched it as I ate the rest of the fruit.  Its magnetism makes me think it should be the heart of a new novel, or poem, or some simple-deep truth.  Something about promise being hidden in ordinary stuff.  Something about extraordinary depending on the eyes we use to see things.  Something about tiny, gentle, swaddled being the place where big stuff starts.

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