Trespassing

I am most certainly bold enough to go into your backyard when you are not home, when you are not looking, or when you are sleeping, to take the unpicked fruit from your tree. Mostly, it is because I do not feel guilty for taking what you have by default, thrown away.
That being said, I do recognize that trespassing on someone's property has a bit stronger of an implication than simply plucking fruit off a tree that is technically not one's own.
So I do not tread lightly when I do so. And I will say, for the record, that in nearly all cases, I knock on the front door to ask permission to pluck fruit, first.

In many cases, things happen just like so- I knock on the door. Someone answers. I pop the question. They oblige me. I harvest.
But many times, the situation is just not ideal. Take last night, for instance. It is after two in the morning. I am returning home with my woman. I realize that we are close to an alley full of citrus, and we are out at home. So, we take a quick detour and pass through the aforementioned alley. The first tree we spy has already been plucked from the alley, so the only fruit left accessible, without going over the particularly steep fence of the home, is accessible only from the roof of the back-house. So, we parallel park the vehicle against the wall and turn the tire out. I climb between the tire and the wall, up to the roof of the vehicle, from where I can climb onto the roof. I managed to pick about a dozen ripe Valencia oranges, which we juiced today.
Or here is another situation, which was three days ago. We're walking through a neighborhood in Lakewood (a suburb of Long Beach) and come across a house with an avocado tree (!!! There are almost no fruit bearing trees in this neighborhood, so I was astonished) with every branch bending from the weight of unpicked avocados! Of course, all the fruit had been picked from reachable heights by the sidewalk. So, I go to the door, and knock. I wait a moment and ring the doorbell, for good measure. No answer. So, I go back to the wall by the tree, climb the wall, climb the tree, and pick something between ten and twenty avocados. Big bastards, too! I have them stuffed in a paper bag with some apples right now, waiting for them to get ripe.

So, as it goes, I am a trespasser. It's fun climbing a tree at two in the morning, or sneaking around on a roof. I know that my actions have the potential to get me arrested, but that won't stop me from eating fruit from the tree. Perhaps it seems ridiculous to do these things from a well behaved of view, yet society at large is a bit ridiculous sometimes, from mine. I guess we're tit for tat. =)


ft.