I found a fig at the Market Basket today. Thirty cents of luxury just lying there, waiting.

Figs are exotic and familiar. My first exposure to figs was in the cookie–those cellophane rectangles of stacked cookies from a yellow box. Nabisco has tried putting raspberry filling in them, maybe other flavors. It just seems wrong. Figs. Dried figs in a market on the Hill… I bought them, pretty as they were strung like a necklace, dried, like dates, Mediterranean sweetness right in my own home. Not a raisin, not a prune, but some promise of Italy, if desiccated, distant, drained of all its vitality.

I never saw a fresh fig as a child. Fruits like that were just not known in our world. Figs like that were on botanical prints, in Gourmet Magazine photos, on Mottadehah, with crème fraîche, all drizzled with honey, on a table, on a patio with a misty blue sea just there on the horizon. They never had things like that in the musty midwest, in the suburbs of perfectly functional cities that perhaps contained past wonders, some glorious past that I must have missed. I was instead sentenced to a mundane existence that was good for nothing, I thought, except my pondering a life beyond it.

A fig is a filthy fruit. Scandalous to eat them, especially as I ate my first one, desperate to try one–a little unsure my French really was a language people understood. Amazing–un demi kilo de figues–they did! and I bought them, a lot of them, and I ate them right there, right there in the market on a September afternoon when I was in Paris and amazed to be in Paris, and aware–quite aware–that I would later look back on those months I spent there as something as glorious as I had always imagined they would be. And I do. Oh yes, Paris was all I ever dreamed it might be, awnings and flowers and coffee. And figs! Oh yes, I really did eat my first one right there in the market, unsure how to do it, so I just bit into it, skin and all. Are you supposed to eat the skins? I still don’t know and I still do, and I still love them that way most, just biting into the skin and flesh and seeds. Nothing like a Newton! Lush and wonderful, lively. And yes, I still imagine those yellow-skinned figs when I eat them now, carrying the few I have left through the streets in a 14e arrondissement in my dreams. They are not a madeleine, not comforting and childlike in my mind, but evocative still, and indecent, and full of sin and lust.