It's Pear Awareness Week in the Department of Salad! 🍐

Please be kind to pears. They can't ripen in the blink of an eye—but you can still put them in these pear-aware salads. 🍐

The DOS A-B-C-D Pear Salad features dates, celery, and Parmigiano-Reggiano.

THE POET MARY OLIVER, in her beautiful poem “The Summer Day,” famously asked: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? It’s a line that gets repeated so often here in the Age of the Internet that you’d think it would lose its power. But it doesn’t—at least, not for me. Every time it pops up, I get a jolt into awakeness. Tempus fugit!

As a non-poet, my question for the world is much smaller, but it’s still important (to me): What is it you plan to do with your precious pears?

Because right now, in my locale and all over the United States, it’s peak pear season. A time of the year when I fantasize about renting a cargo van, backing it up to my favorite farmers market, and bringing home every single hue and shape and variety they have for sale and arranging them in beautiful jumbles in every room, like flowers. I’d just let them sit there being fetching and eventually attracting bees.

Everyone knows it’s best to buy fruits and vegetables according to their natural harvest calendar. But it can be hard to remember that seasonality even exists. Much like the nonstop, firehose flow of information on the internet, pears can be obtained practically any time you want them in this modern, automatic world: Indiscriminate pears, 24-7, 365 days a year. Such profusion not only reduces the wonder of the pear and of the bounty of easy information but makes both suspect. Who exactly is in charge here?

Pepper your pears generously for the DOS Four Ps Salad (Pear, Parsley, Pecorino, Pistachios)

No one really knows who is in charge of the internet—it could be a Girl Scout troop in Yankton, South Dakota. But the answer regarding pears (and other produce) is clear and eternal: It’s nature, of course.

And as much as we try to make nature obey our every whim—encouraging fruits and flowers and vegetables to be omnipresent; persuading large, wild animals to ride bikes at the circus; seeding clouds to produce rain; building levees and sea walls; expecting a cartoon bear to prevent forest fires—it rarely works out the way we want it to.

All of which reminds me of Chris Rock’s comment about the shocking sensation caused when a trained white tiger named Mantacore attacked Roy Horn, of the flashy Vegas duo Siegfried and Roy: That tiger didn’t go crazy. That tiger went tiger.