Laughin Lalo: Loot

As fall (my favorite season) comes to a close, the leaves on the trees changing into their most lustrous gowns of crimson and blotchy orange and yellow, cold, wet, and unpredictable weather setting in, I love to go for walks in this neighborhood. Discovering unused food in Provo has become a bit of a hobby for me. The past summer I was able to reap the benefits of an abandoned black berry bush and plum trees, not to mention the yummy grapes I stole. This time I asked for permission to partake of unused fruit on trees. It truly amazes me how people won't put this fruit to good use! The first was a pear tree a couple of blocks over. I knocked on the door and a 20 something woman answered, I had apparently woken her up...it was 1 pm. I asked politely if I could have some pears and she said "ya whatever" and shut the door, "Thank you" I replied through wood. The next house was men's housing and I totally had that in the bag, they could care less about the crisp apples on the tree and the ones falling every few minutes on the ground cracking open for the sake of the wasps which were incidentally loving life. After I had spoken to all the necessary people I went to Andrew's house and was super excited. He however was not so excited and it took a lot of pleading and begging to get him to come, but a slice of apple pie and a half hour of whining did the trick. See I need Andrew because he is taller than me by at least 6 inches and can reach higher. We did pears first, the ground was littered with gross sticky mess. There were pears everywhere and I really stress that, EVERYWHERE! It smelled like rotting fruit and as soon as we started picking, the tree was disturbed and the pears would plummet to the ground like sugar bombs, they would make a sickening splat sound. Some were brown and gushy, others that fell were OK so I just picked them up and put it in our bushel basket. After we picked all we could with the 6 foot ladder we climbed up on the roof of the house to get up higher, and after that Andrew climbed the tree and shook the branches nothing really came of that though because they were all squishy! I would run out from under the tree with my hands covering my head yelling and slipping on rotting pears. It was really gross but fun, I found a birds nest with dead birds in it, I thought it was pretty in a really morbid kind of way.
After the pear extravaganza we headed over for apples, at this point Andrew was really enjoying himself and trying to get all he could which was great but he was scaring me because he would stand on the top step of the ladder, I swore at him a few times and he told me to stop being smotherly and continued to be "daring". Luckily he didn't die, we would position the ladder in different positions to gain the most produce, one time we were actually right on 900 east I couldn't stop laughing because we must have looked like a couple of loonies. We had a blast and now I get to can it all and make applesauce, Andrew will get some jars for helping of course. Here are some pics from our adventure!