A brown paper bag greeted me when I opened the front door.

I touched it. Its contents felt squishy. Dog shit? I wondered, more curious than repulsed. I looked inside the bag. Figs! Some ripe to bursting, others firm. My neighbor John, the one who introduced me to kayaking on the Hudson, had surprised me with a gift from his favorite market on Arthur Avenue, a neighborhood in the Bronx where traditional Italian shops still sell handmade pasta and imported cheese and run tabs for store credit for longtime customers.

Figs are a generous fruit. When we lived in San Carlos, south of San Francisco near Menlo Park, our backyard had an orange tree I used for cocktails and marmalade, and over the fence hung a prolific fig tree rooted in our neighbor’s yard. It fruited twice a year, in June and September. Each time the birds would eat the ripest ones but even after they’d had their fill, there were more figs than we could pick or eat, and that was just on the side of the tree hanging over our yard. I tried cooking them – a fig tart in a pretty ruffled pan – but nothing was as good as eating them plain. Their skin flays into open seams. Their inside like a sea creature, coral tentacles soft and tart with a subtle crunch from the seeds. The taste is just fig – it tastes like itself.

John couldn’t have known how deep my love of figs goes. I squealed when I realized what they were, touched by the spontaneous generosity of the gesture. I ate them raw out of my hand, smashed on toast, torn or sliced on yogurt. I mourned them when they were gone.

At the farmers market the next Saturday, my friend Sandra and I continued our recording sessions of stories from the farmers and community in honor of the market’s 25th anniversary. “Take me on a market tour,” Sandra said. “Show me your favorite stands and what you see.” We approached Wright’s Farm, with a few boxes of figs nestled between late season raspberries and thick-skinned grapes. “I love these,” I told her, “but they’re $10,” I said, missing the bounty of our free backyard figs. I decided to be generous to myself and bought them anyway. “Eight dollars,” the vendor said, the price down from last week. I ate the biggest bursting one.

After the market, Sandra and I continued recording as we delivered the “market gleaning” baskets shoppers had filled with vegetables for our local food pantry. When the baskets were empty and the fridge was full, we went to Sandra’s porch to celebrate. She made beautiful salads and poured sangria. We sliced the figs with a nub of Moonrise cheese, lounging in quiet contentment.

When I’m generous to myself I’m able to serve others from a light heart. That generosity flows back to me, sometimes through direct reciprocity, but often in indirect, unexpected ways. Like a bag of figs in my front door, full of a fruit that always surprises me.