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By Don Del Rosso
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
Ralph Crafts can’t help himself.
Almost compulsively, he grows fig trees, as many as skill and the nature gods allow.
He spends more time than a man probably ought to thinking about and practicing new ways to produce the dark and tiny, pear-shaped fruit.
But for Crafts, it’s really not about newfangled growing techniques or the trees or the figs. Indeed, the former Marine Corps jet pilot has never tasted a fig. Never. And in the nearly 20 years that he’s cultivated the trees, Crafts has never been tempted to pluck a fig and pop it in his mouth. Not once.
The bigger and more important truth is that Ralph Crafts grows fig trees because he loves his ailing wife Roseann and wants to honor her “Grandpa,” Anthony Moretta of Queens, N.Y., who died in 1995.
Moretta, who produced figs without equal, meant the world to her, recalled Roseann, who for years has endured severe pain caused by an intestinal disease that almost killed her in 2004.
Nearly 20 years ago, Crafts began growing fig trees, using branches from grandpa’s tree.
“It’s about perpetuating something that meant so much to my wife and her grandpa,” said Crafts, who admits his emotions sometimes get the best of him on the topic. “It’s not about fig trees. It’s about Grandpa’s figs!”
And it’s about Grandpa himself.
As a child in Queens, N.Y., Roseann, 54, grew up eating the figs grown by her maternal grandfather, and developed a life-long love for the honey-flavored fruit, whose harvest season runs from late August to late October.
“I associate figs with my grandpa,” says Rosanne, a superb cook (according to Ralph), who uses them to sweeten recipes, in bread, for sauce over pork loin and other ways too numerous to list. “I think that has a lot to do with it.”
They also represent a tangible reminder of her longago childhood in Corona, where it seemed as if all her Italian neighbors had a fig tree, Roseann says.
“It was part of my everyday life,” Roseann recalls at the couple’s dining room table. “Everybody had their [fig] tree. The yards were so close together, they’d overhang from one fence, and you randomly picked. And nobody said anything, because they’re hanging over your
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