It amused me no end and I went to take its picture. Where did I put my phone… And then I got distracted to something else.

There had been a pair of pomegranates hanging onto the tree that I could have picked weeks ago but I’d never gotten them past the critters long enough to see how long they should/would stay there if I let them. I had a small pop-up style birdnetting tent–not over them, trying to balance it in those branches was too fiddly, but sideways with the fruit sort of just inside the bottom of it and the top of the tent facing the fence: En garde! (Autocorrect added an n. I am much amused.) I knew they were accessible but the critters who could reach it didn’t have to know that from their favorite runway and I knew they did not want to be in a cage.

It worked!

Michelle’s a fan of pomegranate juice and on her last night here I squeezed the ones that had been kept in the fridge, and that was as much of that work as I wanted to do at the time.

I checked. The two on the tree were still there.

This morning she was back in Boston and some sheer curiosity got me to go outside to check those fruits again.

Picture a little kid on Christmas morning tearing open a present: the strip of wrapping paper still attached to the tape in their hand while the box falls away. That’s essentially what was left: two stems, each with a thin strip of the bright red outer rind.

While all of the rest was utterly gone.

I laughed. The timing! As if they’d only been holding on for her! How did something get to both of them among those thorns, how did it eat that much? I wanted to get a photo. Didn’t I put it–where was it? Huh. Whatever.

We were just sitting down to dinner when something just really nagged at me and I apologized and said, I have to know if I left that phone in the car, I haven’t been able to find it anywhere. He said Go ahead, and meant it, so I got right back up from the chair I’d just sat down in.

It wasn’t in the car.

It was on the ground in front of the passenger door for all to see where it had fallen out of my purse when I got out this morning.

Had I waited ten more minutes there wouldn’t have been enough light left to see it there and I might well have stepped on it going to the car door to look. I’m just glad it was still there.

Thank you pomegranate silliness…