Scrumping
August 14, 2017 #From a New Yorker article on The Lost Art of Stealing Fruit:
In the school fiction of yesteryear, “scrumping” was what schoolboys, primarily, did in orchards. Nowadays, with fried-chicken shops on every corner, the art of fruitnapping is lost. Not, however, by me.
There’s no English word for the frenzied state into which I’m thrown when I see a tree thick with crab apples, or greengages, or pears. Are you seriously expecting me, a greedy person, to ignore the deliciously bitter Morello cherries near the station, or the neglected grape vine by that garage, or the vast banks of blackberries that litter Britain’s parks and heaths, largely overlooked except by the occasional elderly Pole or Czech, similarly purple-stained, with whom I exchange a brief, competitive glance?
Many an evening this Summer, the blocks surrounding our NE Portland house have been the scene of strolls with the boys as we explore our new neighborhood. I'm now delighted to have expanded my vocabularly to be able to relate the apples, pears, plums, figs, blackberries and huckleberries on offer for a bit of scrumping.