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When I first met Vittorio, he had sunned wrinkled skin, dried apricot cheeks and a head of once black hair. He always spoke passionately, displaying his exuberant spirit and quick sense of humor. We ate our meals outside, a decanter of red wine between us, Italian and English bleeding together over the flavors of tomato, oregano, and lemon. Our first dinner together he told me about the children he had scattered throughout Europe, a Sicilian Casanova with a green thumb. I worked on his small farm for two weeks. We chopped wood and cleared branches. In the garden, we pulled thick green beans from their stalks, and in the orchard, filled woven baskets with fresh figs and pears. Fig trees are found in only warm climates, can grow up to 30 feet tall, and while they produce wide lobed bright green leaves, its unassuming flowers are not visible from the outside. Instead the plump purple fruits that hang below the greenery house an inflorescence, accessible to a single pollinator. A female fig wasp enters the fig through a hole in the bottom of the fruit, the ostiole. Once inside, she lays her eggs, pollinates the female flowers, and dies. The wingless males are born first, immediately find a female wasp and, still trapped in the flower ovary she’s born out of, mate with them before they emerge. Once born, the winged female wasps collect pollen from the male flowers while the male wasps dig a tunnel out of the fig. The females then leave and repeat the process, pollinating their own fruit. Having completed their task, the male wasps die without ever having left the great violet room. Tree and wasp. The perfectly cultivated romance. Every morning, we would wake up and walk tree to tree, checking each fig for the depth of its color and with a gentle squeeze, it’s ripeness. There was never a shortage of figs in the kitchen. We ate them constantly, plunging a thumb into the soft purple side, its sweetness melting across our tongues. I worked there with an Italian couple, Ale and Mirko. Mirko didn’t speak English well and Ale often scolded him for it. On one sun-kissed afternoon Ale and I were sitting in front of the house cracking open hazelnuts when Mirko swaggered up, leaned on the table and said, with too much effort to be casual, “What time o’clock?” People find endless ways to say, “I love you.” Flowers, breakfast in bed, a sharpied note on a lunchbox napkin. On a summer morning you can find it hidden on the kitchen table of a Sicilian farmhouse, plump and juicy, so sweet you could swallow it whole.