Coming to Fruition
it's time to grow
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor […] and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
There is a fig tree in my garden whose leaves are large as dinner plates and thick as tablecloths. The khamseen, a hot, dry wind that blows from Egypt all the way through the Levant, rustles through the fig leaves with a shh-tchtch-shh-tchtch-shh. It seems all the yards here in West Amman have fig trees, but the tree in my yard is particularly monstrous. I think it must grow several inches per day. It threatens our upstairs neighbors’ balcony and the sidewalk beyond our garden wall.