Fruit without a stone, its shiny pulp is clear green.
Inside, tiny black microdot seeds.
Skin the color of
Imagine a shaggy brown-green pelt that feels like felt. It's oval, full-rounded, kind of egg-shaped.
The rind comes off in strips when peeled with the lips. If ripe, full of juice, melon-sweet, yet tart as goose- berry almost.
A translucent ring of seed dots looks something like a coin-slice of banana.
Grown in the tropics, some stone fruits, overlarge, are queerly formed.
A slablike pit nearly fills the mango.
I scrape the fibrous pulp off with my teeth.
That slick round ball in avocado (fruit without juice) we call alligator pear: Plant this seedpit with care on three toothpicks over a glass of water.
It can come to pass in time, that you'll see an entire avocado tree. Some fruits have stones, some seeds. Papaya's loaded with slimy black beads. Some seem seedlesslike quince (that makes your tastebuds wince.) Persimmon will be sour, astringent "until dead ripe," they say.
Behind pomegranate's leathery rind, is a sackful of moist rubies.
Pear, cantaloupe, grapefruit, guava keep their seeds hidden, as do raspberry, strawberry, pineapple.
Plum, peach and cherry we know as fruits with big seedstones.
And fig? Its graininess is seed.
Hard to believe is prickly durian.
It's custard sweetand smells nasty. But there's no fruit as tasty, as odd, or as funny none as fresh-off-the-vine New Zea- land kiwi.
