Pears. Hard little green ones. The high whine of golf carts, which you could hear for yards and yards off before they came crashing through the high weeds and rolling crunchily over the dead leaves.
That's how I remember it. The Great Pear Fight of 2003. The ragged, wind-torn live oaks all bent out of shape by the wind. And, deep among them, an abandoned vineyard flanked by two ecstatically green pear trees. And there they were: the pears, dropping harder and faster than the leaves. One of them thunking down on my cousin Thomas' head, and him chucking it right back at its branches, but missing badly and hitting my sister's arm instead. Her, returning the favor with a brown one gone brown and mealy with over-ripeness.
Back and forth tough little fruits sailed between all eight children in the vineyard, until Thomas had had enough of it and hopped on one of three golf carts to make his getaway. My sister threw one hard enough to smear pale juice all over the windshield, and we all liked the sound it made so much that golf carts officially became part of every ambush. We chased each other all over the island, dodging between trees and drawing five-minute truces on the shore, where it was too sandy for the golf carts to go.
It was simple enough, at first. Cousins on our side against cousins on their side. Then, once our brother started telling us where to go and when and how, my sisters and I all defected to join our girl cousins--transforming the day into a Boys vs. Girls free for all. It got more confusing after that, breaking down into pairs of cousins and siblings who liked each other best. Then, ultimately, it was whoever was driving a golf cart versus the out of breath people chasing after them. And all the way through it, I was charged with stopping back at previous battlegrounds to retrieve the spoils and, if we were desperate, the vineyard. I wasn't mad about it. I had lousy aim. Better to pity myself for the achy bruise blotted on my arm after being hit hard by a fat green one. And pitying myself, too, for the way my shirt was getting stretched out by the pears I was piling into it. For being cajoled into plucking tiny, shy ones from the high branches: the kind of pear wholly unprepared to be launched at another child's head. I shouldn't have picked those. I know it.
As it started to rain, everything began to look and smell like an early dusk. So I gave up, sticky, with salt on my tongue from being next to the shore all day. I was the first to go inside and pretend to feel bad about my pants being tacky with pear juice and stained brown from god knows what. It took a half hour for the rest of them to filter in, looking tired and having absolutely no energy to argue with each other for the rest of that cool, cricket-filled night.
Really, you'd never have thought that in ten years' time, our families would be trying to tear that property from one another; as if needing an entire island to themselves was a sign of status, not instability. They draft up statement after statement about what the original owner intended and who truly has a right to own the place, at least on paper. They don't care about the vineyard and its trees, though. And why would they?
Hasn't borne a pear since.