The Lost Art of Stealing Fruit
“I’ll just be half an hour,” I say to my picnicking family. Poor fools, they still believe me. They don’t realize that absolutely nothing compares to the thrill of fruit-hunting: the covert slipping through the foliage; the scanning for a telltale glisten of color; the way that—deep in the hedgerow, scratched and juice-streaked, breath held as one searches for another dusty bitter plum, then another—time stops.
Charlotte Menelson’s articles in the New Yorker are great.