PEACHES, GONE

We have four peach trees here. All four are beautiful in bloom in the spring and all four bear a lot of fruit in summer. Two bear fabulously sweet yellow peaches. Two bear less sweet (and harder) white peaches. I hear the white peaches are better for cooking – but you can’t prove it by me. I don’t like them. It’s the juicy yellow ones I love. (No apple in Eden; I’m sure it was a peach!) 

We’ve picked nearly the last of them. Soon, this year’s peaches will be gone. 

I wash them and cut them up and refrigerate them for awhile – eating my fill while peeling and slicing, of course. 

When I was a boy, we had a peachtree in the backyard. The roads into our town were lined with orchards. Those were the days when the Peach State was chock full of sweet yellow peaches.

I do not recall ever eating one from our own tree, though we bought pecks and pecks from the roadside stands. We didn’t know fruit trees so I don’t think ours was ever pruned. The peaches were knobby little things, eaten by birds or made into missiles by us neighborhood boys long before the fruit ripened. (China Berries and Persimmons, too – but those are stories for another day.)

I did not love our peach tree. It grew switches. Yes, I grew up when corporal punishment was still in fashion. My mother would make me go cut the switch she would use. (If you do not know what a switch is - lucky you! My mother always said that using one hurt her more than it hurt me but I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now.)

One day I tried to kill the tree by scattering salt around the roots (my summer reading had included stories about the Romans). That didn’t work. Another day, I tried to chop it down down with a hatchet (I daydreamed of becoming President and not telling a lie about it. But I did lie when my dad asked who had been chopping on his peach tree. That was not presidential.) 

The hatchet didn’t work, either. Eventually the tree died, or was cut down, but I don’t know when or why – and now there’s no one to ask. I just know I didn’t do it.

All that is the past. All is forgiven! Now I love peach trees! 

This year, like Israel in the Promised Land, like the blessed of every generation, I eat the fruit of trees I did not plant – as I hope will my children and my children’s children. Selah.

I will try to tend the trees better so that the best prophecies may be fulfilled. I read that I should prune them much more heavily than the conservative pruning I gave them last winter (and that only because last Summer’s fruit was so bountiful that one of the trees broke). E is horrified when I show her pictures of what a well-pruned tree looks like right after the deed is done. 

And I understand. I identify with the tree – life has pruned me more than once, and sometimes quite drastically. I hope I have borne some good fruit – but I don’t feel like more pruning, thank you very much.

Hmmm … maybe I’ll prune the trees that grow white peaches first ….