Notes on a Peach

** Dear Reader: It is best to read this short fictional piece in succession to my first blog entry although not necessary. All names and facts are fictional. Enjoy!


Dear Josephine-
I got your note and I had to write you back. I passed the peach tree for a second time today. This time I felt less angry than that first day when I read your note and wanted to behave like a recalcitrant teenage girl whose parents took away her car keys for blowing off curfew. Is it true you own the tree… like… legally or does your heart own it much in the way my ego owns my waywardness? I tried to convince myself that you had no more entitlement than me to that strip of lawn that divides the sidewalk from the street I walk every day. I know it doesn’t matter and I do not expect you to answer the question. I consider the peach tree yours and the aggression mine.

I imagine you in your quaint Capitol Hill home preparing the peach chutney you will give to your only son who routinely visits you each Saturday at noon. He will seal the leak in your shower, carefully puttying the pink and gray speckled tiles around the faucet in your tub. His hands reflect his aging process. “Wisdom spots,” he shares. He spends time in the sun working construction when he is not with you, fixing your leaks, securing your ground. He will work tenderly, his hands moving back and forth over the tiles like the metronome he remembers tapping out the rhythm to Pachabel’s Canon in D he practiced in elementary school.

You moved into your home when John Jr. was only nine, just a year before cancer inhabited the body of your late husband and moved him to his new home, as you believed, in heaven. Your family would know their neighbors, borrow sugar and loan eggs before church on Sundays. John Jr. would have friends down the road who he’d ride bicycles with after dinner on summer evenings. You would stand at the kitchen sink, rinsing the remnants of pork and potato from the dinner plates, listening to the symphony of scratching forks and the yelping of boys outside the kitchen window. John Jr. would still have his innocence then just like you who knew routine and predictability like an intimate friend.

John Sr. was your high school sweetheart. He took you to the cotillion in 1oth grade because he said, “I want to go with prettiest girl at school.” He would flatter you and bestow his kindness upon your heart for the next 20 years. He would become a book shop owner with a wide collection of Black Literature. He was liberal and well-read, wanting to know the hearts and souls of humans even when none of his friends or family understood this in him. You did. You got him and loved him more for the poetry he read in people’s eye, regardless of race or religion.

You would teach high school literature. You had your two favorite classics, Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist. You sympathized with the two orphaned protagonists, teaching your students about determination. You would not know then that all of the many years spent teaching about these characters would foreshadow you becoming an adult orphan. Widow never suited you in same way orphan did. “Widow” assumed you were an elder with wisdom to impart. “Orphan” was more apt, you determined, as you felt like an abandoned child after John passed. John Jr. would bring you tea with milk each night. “Here. Drink this, Ma,” He would say. In those moments, your teenage son became both mother offering breast and father offering protection. You sensed this and knew it as unfair, but you were listless and rendered emotionally mute from your own grief and could not muster the words to assume your own role as mother.

The May before John Jr. graduated high school was a remarkable spring. The mornings were frigid still as if winter refused to cease. You would wake early and sip your tea in the large window of the front room. Dawn would cloak each blade of grass in white wooly ice coats. You could not help to notice how the glass would glisten as the sun introduced itself each morning with it's bright smile. You would warm your shiver by washing down the pot of earl gray tea. You would imagine that the song bird was a Cyrano D’Bergerac of sorts, offering you a serenade from John Sr. in heaven. You would hum with the birds in search of synchrony, a way to reconcile your widowhood.

On Mother’s Day that year, John Jr.awakened earlier than usual. He sat with you in silence as he witnessed your ritual gaze at the dewy lawn. You remember hearing him sip on tea that morning and felt confronted by the sound of your son sitting so closely and intimately with you in silent space. Your eyes would moisten like dew drops in your tear ducts for the grief that could not be expressed. John would break the silence by noting how fresh the lawn looked at that time of the morning.

Next he would surprise you when he gently offered his gift to you by leading you into the space behind the tool shed out back. “This is for you. Happy Mother’s Day, Ma. I love you,” He said. John would then drag out a verdant green tree, no taller that 5 ft. in height. “I know how you love peaches. Everyone has an apple or pear tree. This is for you. It can grow large enough to bare enough peaches to be canned for an entire winter season.”

That morning your eyes would transcend into two little soldiers in their valiant effort to feign bravery. The fight to convince John Jr. and yourself of your stoicism would last an entire 2 minutes but would lose when tears would spring from your eyes, no longer little soldiers but gigantic geysers. Then, a sound so beautifully human and filled with genuine sadness would emerge from your quivering lips and silence even the birds as if they were offering space for only your song of sorrow to be heard. And John Jr. would offer another gift; the space for you to mourn and his unrelenting presence as he would gaze upon you softly, his eyes meeting yours in the kindest of ways and nodding his head slowly.

It is now late summer and morning has invited you to tend to all that lives and thrives in your yard. You find a few dead leaves around your peach tree, now 36 years old. You grab your rake from the tool shed and begin to gently comb the few strewn leaves and the knotted roots of the tree with the same tenderness you remember your Grandma Bessie using when she would comb through your long gnarled hair as a child. Now your hair is braided with hints of silver streaks, like the way lightening paints glimmers in the sky. Your braid hangs to your low back and covers your scoliosis; a strong, straight, braid, each nub of sectioned hair a vertebrae holding the braid in place.

When you have finished raking you walk into your kitchen. You rummage through the drawer where you keep coupons, scissors, a hammer, nails and your collection of bill statements until you come across your sign. “Please do no take my peaches or shake the tree. Thanks, Josephine.” You tack it to the tree and with your shaking arthritic fingers and reach for one peach to bring inside. When your fingers touch the peach and feel it's fuzz, you bring the peach to your cheek, close your eyes, smell it sweetness and remember the feel of John Jr.'s hair when he was a baby. You linger and a few tears make their way down the little peach fuzz of your own face. You go inside to your old comfortable couch nestled below the window in the front room and grab your monogrammed stationary. John will be visiting tomorrow. You promised him pie this Saturday, not just chutney. You write him a brief letter.

Dear John-

This morning when I grabbed a peach and touched it's flesh and fuzzy skin, all I could imagine was you as a young boy, your amazing sweetness and the kindness you have afforded me my entire life. I tacked the sign on the tree again this year and realize, to the neighbors, this may look like greed. After dad died all I had was you to love and I could not even show you my love when I was entrenched so deeply in my grief. When you gave me this peach tree, somehow life began to unfurl itself again, slowly, year to year, as I have witnessed this tree grow with amazing persistence and offer me it's beauty every summer. Love is an infinite bounty. Thank you for giving me this tree, the fruit of your kindness and way for me to see beauty after your dad died. IT has been 36 years since you gifted me the peach tree. I am beginning to think by next summer, I might allow the neighbors to pick the peaches.

Much Love-
Mom

Lessons in Fruit

I have an obsession. I forage fruit. I have embodied Archetypal Eve and I get her desire, her sin, her innocence and her longing for Adam. My fruit snatching began as a simple joy, a vehicle for sustenance and validation. In the back alleys of my neighborhood, I transcend “Eve” to become a cat, hunting my trophy and carrying it home to show it off to Patrick, hoping for the reward of praise. At least, this is how it all began.

I scour the neighborhoods of Seattle and rural back country roads in hopes of seeing the fire engine red of an apple skin, the bold and distinctly-shaped leaves of a fig tree, or pears dangling from branches like delicates drying on a clothes line that only the neighbors might see. Italian prune plums and grapes tirelessly grace the back alleys with their abundance. There is the rare peach tree denoted by a sign “Please do not take my peaches or shake the tree. Thanks. Josephine.”

As an avid urban hiker, I have stumbled upon the Zen of foraging, using it as a tool for mindful discoveries on my daily walks. I love that in any given moment, there is beauty and decay confronting me constantly. Each branch, fruit, insect, or note tacked to the tree becomes my mirror to reflect the inherent beauty and decay of my long-held beliefs, my mental habits, the ways in which I react.

Sometimes I go rural. Lopez Island, my summer haunt, offers miles of blackberry landscape, an odyssey of bees and purple juice waiting to stain my fingers. Wild apple and pear trees stipple the stretch of brush with their complementary hues of yellows and reds. There is something intrinsically magical about finding fruit in nature to nuture the body. Like fruit, we all begin as seed and witnessing the blossoming of a fruit reminds us of our own potential to grow into something sweet.

It is also about longing for sweetness. Standing on tippy toes and extending the full length of the spine to reach the fruit is an embodiment of longing. We reach for nourishment. This is hopeful and allows us to consider how, instinctively, we lean into what is good for us. When I was in 5th grade science class, I remember being intrigued learning about the stimuli effect in plants. Ms. Bonora has us each go home and diligently observe plant life. I was dumbfounded at the tendency for the plant to begin to grow toward the sun. I found this pull of the plant, much like the gravitational pull of the earth, a fantastic scientific fact. That the plant, without a heart or brain would be able to move towards best self care practice. Isn’t that amazing?

Foraging invites the phenomenal by seeing ourselves as mere images of nature. The plant leans toward the sun to grow and animals and humans lean toward plants to grow, to nourish. I am in an involuntary symbiotic relationship to these plants and trees via a carbon dioxide and oxygen exchange. This is not something I consciously create but rather the gift and mysticism of nature’s order. What I am coming to learn is that there is an unspoken dialogue I am in with the trees and plants around me. They want to teach me. My writings are the lessons I am learning and the inquiries that crop up.