~/brianamoah/interesting-things

Interesting Things

Facts, finds, and rabbit holes. No theme. That's the theme.

• books 2026.10.05

  Odysseus proves who he is with a list of fruit trees

  At the end of the Odyssey, Odysseus’s father doesn’t believe the stranger in front of him is his son. Scars aren’t enough. So Odysseus recites the trees Laertes gave him as a boy: thirteen pear trees, ten apple trees, forty fig trees, and fifty rows of vines. That’s the password. After twenty years of war and wandering, identity comes down to an orchard inventory a father and son both remember.