The Fruit of Cassie’s Spirit
Our pineapple plant had a lot of memories tied up in it. Back in 2014, Cassie and I were at a music festival in Jacksonville where a certain pineapple drink vendor threw away all the tops of the pineapples he used. After that festival, we returned to Kissimmee with a couple dozen pineapple tops to try planting. She had more than a couple tops sitting in glasses all around her college dorm. I had a dozen in various window sills throughout the house I was living in, plus a dozen more in the makeshift garden behind that house. It was the first successful gardening adventure we ever embarked on.
Despite starting so many of those plants, only one of them managed to make it to our first home when we got married in 2015. That pineapple was part of our first garden together, the one a friend had us pose for an impromptu photo-shoot around on Easter 2016. After being knocked out of its pot a number of times, that pineapple plant bloomed in mid-Spring of 2016, just like our marriage. It didn’t fruit until the end of the Summer of 2016, right before we got our dog, Julep.
We had talked for a while about throwing a big party when the thing finally was ready to pick. Unfortunately for me, when the time came to pick the embarrassingly small fruit, Cassie decided she wasn’t really feeling like inviting a bunch of people over to cook for (you can tell by how unphotogenic she was in pictures of the day). BUT, she promised with all of her heart that we actually would have a huge celebration when we harvested the next pineapple—we would wear all the pineapple patterned clothes we had and Cassie would play Penelope, her pineapple-shaped ukelele. We dubbed the day, Pineapple Day.
Unfortunately Cassie never made it to see the next pineapple harvest. She got to see it grow giant, sharp, serrated, obnoxious leaves. We watched it become the largest pineapple plant either of us ever saw—in real life or in googled pictures of what they are supposed to be like. The stupid thing took up the entire porch and left scratches all over our arms anytime we tried to move it. That pineapple plant actually drew blood a few times! And to top it off, its timing was completely different compared to its parent.
My Piña Party
The thing didn’t bloom until I left for Ireland in June and it wasn’t ready to pick until I ran away to Mexico at the end of October. I had been looking forward to the day for a long time. So when it finally ripened, I had a few plans for what I might want to do for my pineapple party.
The week of the harvest, I invited a family from church over for dinner. They were a family who has been there for me since the night the news of Cassie’s accident broke. I figured food worth celebrating deserves people worth celebrating to eat it with.
I really tried to make it a celebration too. I cooked up a giant pineapple-themed meal (I may have overdone it a bit). There was a small turkey with a pineapple dressing roasted alongside pineapple slices. There was pineapple casserole. And to make it feel more like a fall, harvest-time meal, there was acorn squash baked with a pineapple-brown sugar syrup coating it.
We kicked the evening off by ceremonially plucking the pineapple from the stalk. At the end of dinner, we ceremonially stuck the top of the pineapple in a glass of water. After everyone left, I stayed busy for the rest of the night by making the homegrown fruit into a pineapple-upside cake. I tried to spice up the cake by using cookie cutters to make fun shapes of the pineapple slices that would ultimately decorate the top of the cake (e.g. goats, cacti, gingerbread men, stars). Unfortunately baking cakes was never my forte, so the top of the cake was just a mess of indiscriminate fruit blobs. Either way, the people at my church who shared in eating it thought it was tasty enough.
Pineapple Day, A Holy Day
From a biblical standpoint, the whole ordeal reminded me of the Hebrew Feast of Harvest (also called day of first fruits, Feast of Weeks, or later, Pentecost).
Starting from the day you put the sickle to the ripe grain, count out seven weeks. Celebrate the Feast-of-Weeks (Feast-of-Harvest) to God, your God, by bringing your Freewill-Offering—give as generously as God, your God, has blessed you. Rejoice in the Presence of God, your God: you, your son, your daughter, your servant, your maid, the Levite who lives in your neighborhood, the foreigner, the orphan and widow among you; rejoice at the place God, your God, will set aside to be worshiped.
Deuteronomy 16
I’m expecting some blues during the rest of the holidays this year: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years Eve. It’s kind of a trope for recently bereaved families to have these somber, muted moments at the holiday dinner table. After years of tradition, years of celebration, years of memories, this year stands opposed to all of those. There will come a moment when everyone is gathered around a table, offering thanks to God for all the good things in our lives. But our hearts will also be holding back. Grief will be gripping it, saying, “If you God, decided there is not room for Cassie in our life, then maybe there won’t be room for gratitude either!” Or maybe grief will be shouting out, reminding us, “The person you were most thankful for isn’t here!” And our hearts will melt all over again.
But that isn’t what God wants to see in his people. He says it doesn’t matter who you are—man or woman, adult or child, employed or prisoner, minister or unbeliever, happily married or widowed—there is something that you need to give thanks for. No excuses, apparently.
I think Pineapple Day was my way of doing that this year. I don’t anticipate being as thankful as I normally am each Thanksgiving. But I admit it’s unhealthy to not have a special time of giving thanks. It is unhealthy to let that emotion of grief always win, especially when the message the world is sending us is “Just be joyful. Just be grateful. Just be hopeful.” I had to make sure there was at least one holiday that I could be happy with—even if it was one I invented.
That pineapple plant represented my past with Cassie—our time in college together, our worship together, our homes together, our growth together, our different jobs together, our dreams together, our past harvests together, our past holidays together, our scrapes and cuts together. The fruit seemed to represent the culmination of all those things. I harvested the fruit, I made it an offering to the Body of Christ, I rejoiced in the harvest in the presence of God (Mat 18:20) at a place he designated is good to worship, my dinner table (John 4:21, 1 Cor 10:31). I could be thankful for that plant and that fruit. And more than that, as I grow new ones from the remains of the old, I can be thankful for the hope I still have in the future.
