Wooly weirdness

"It's like eating cotton or felt!" These are the words which came out as I was trying to explain the fruit. We were beneath an oleaster tree in Gallipoli. My travel companions were all wine experts; we were touring the Thracian vineyards and wineries, and this was the only time I found something they did not know before, beyond the grape I mean. The fruits of the tree were just beginning to ripen. I reached for a rusty colored, olive-shaped fruit to pick. Admittedly, my initial explanation had not been appetizing at all, as one might expect. No one was tempted to try. Peter McCombie reluctantly had one, Christy Canterbury was polite not to refuse and Andreas Larsson preferred to look the other way. After a brief pause while tasting the weird fruit, Christy bluntly said: "You were right in describing it like cotton!"

Oleaster is nostalgic for us. It brings most friends of my generation back to their childhoods in an instant. It reminds of school days in early fall. Oleasters wrapped in paper cones would be at sale on the street outside the school gate. I always reserved a portion of my pocket money for a cone of oleasters. No question about it… never! With all this childhood history, I could not refrain from stealing a few from the tree. The moment I had it in my palm, I remembered the entire rite instantly. I would peel the papery outer skin carefully, so as not to disturb the delicate insides, and then pop the revealed tiny cotton thing into my mouth. As the velvety fluffy texture of the odd fruit was moist with my saliva, I'd suck its sweetness while trying to scrape all the flesh from the pointy hard stone. There had been more than one occasion when I pierced my gums or the top of my palate while turning the seed upside down several times in my mouth. I...