Fruit in the Fall

I saw the ad for berries "on sale" for $2.99. Some sale for a half pint, but what can you do when its October and you crave fruit salad all year?
The berries were beautiful. I flip the boxes and check the bottoms for crushed and mouldy berries. These are perfect, which means they just came in. Berries are the most perishable of all fruits, hence the price, hence the seldom seen incoming shipments.
I got blueberries, red raspberries and blackberries and then I saw the gooseberries. I'd never tried them before so I got some of them too. And what is a fruit salad without fresh pineapple? I'm just not going to watch when they ring this up.
I rinse the fruit when I get home, which means I've committed myself now. Once you rinse berries they decompose even faster. No matter. I dice up the chunks of pineapple, throw on black berries, raspberries, blueberries and notice the gooseberries have a tiny dried flower on the end. They look like tiny grapes. I pop one in my mouth. Disappointingly bland. Reminds me of trying star fruit for the first time-stiff rind, flavorless, tart fruit. That little flower end has to go-it tastes like a tiny scrap of paper. feh.
These gooseberries are a strange beast. I bite one alone and crush it gently. The outside it a slightly mealy pulp, slightly tart, dissolves in my mouth. It leaves a group of what feels like caviar in my mouth. Weird. So I slip it off the end of my tongue and look at it. Its gorgeous. Tiny, shiny translucent bumdles of gelatenous matrix around tiny, soft seeds, the same brilliant green of the striped berry. I bite one slippery little seed in its coat. A little more tart than the pulp and the seed is faintly bitter. I eat three more, looking at it, slipping it back in my mouth, feeling it, trying to taste more than tart and faintly bitter, but it gives up nothing more.
It is a little appalling how I play with my food, I know. I unwrap whole candy bars to let them melt while I savor them. Chocolate melting luxuriously, warming, getting more fragrant on my fingertips. I shake your head. Normally I'm  a knife and fork boi. Foods don't touch on my plate.  When something needs to be mixed by hand, I'll come get you. I love the textures changing consistency, knowing by feel when its ready to be turned out of the bowl.
I sprinkle a bit of sugar over the blackberries and sit down with my fruit salad. Its so good. If I could only have one thing to eat for the rest of my life, it would be fruit salad. True story. This is heaven. I eat two big bowls of it while I make dinner of baked cauliflower and spring salad greens.
Life, she's good.