I was an adult before I learned you could buy pretty fruit from the store and in weird ways, that reality shaped my world. Over and again, I grew up in two opposing worlds simultaneously. At once, my outside world was reflected by my father's respectable white collar engineer job. He went to work dressed in suit and tie, with shiny shoes. His colleagues' families lived in staid suburban homes and spent outlandish money on drapes and new furniture. There was an accommodating middle American expectation to it all, certain ways of talking, certain ways of thinking, a sort of firm 1980s' plushness in teal and mauve.
In my early years before homeschool, there was — along with a classroom that wasn't the dining room table — a thing called a "field trip" and my mom always drove us kids as a precaution that somebody didn't lose me in a parking lot somewhere. There was the museum with a special collection of John James Audubon duck art. There was the forest center, where the unseasoned tour guide couldn't tell the difference between a robin's nest and a squirrel's nest. Strange to think she must be elderly by now. She was so young, then, whoever she was. And then there was a seasonally appropriate trip to the local orchard where we were loaded onto a real live hay wagon and allowed to pluck Granny Smith apples from a real live apple tree.
It wasn't my first trip to the orchard. My mom and I would visit often, picking our way through the bags of grade A fruit and fancy displays of fudge or apple cider donuts or hand-dipped taffy apples. I have a weakness for taffy apples and always asked for one, and was almost always refused. "They are too expensive." "We can make them at home for a tenth of the price." And, "No, you don't need one." I learned early on that such trips were not about a fancy on-the-farm experience. We already had a farm. My mom had made sure of that as well. No, we were visiting to look for bad fruit.
By August, the peach season was winding down and the orchard would put out bushel boxes of spoiling peaches for sale. Fruit flies buzzed, the peaches were soft and brown. The boxes were soggy and wafted a faintly winey smell. Suburban mothers in nice clothes walked by and turned up their noses. My mom in worn blue jeans and a flannel work shirt would hoist the boxes deftly, despite her small frame, and we would haul them to the front for check-out. I would admire the beautifully pristine taffy apples, knowing I wasn't going to get one, and then we would take our spoiling fruit home. Spoiling peaches have an exceedingly short shelf life. In fact, they usually have no shelf life at all. Once home, the dining room table would be immediately cleared, fruit flies and gnats would buzz in the air, and we would slice and peel and freeze peaches with abandon, working until the job was done. The rotting leftovers were thrown to the chickens.
Farming life — real farming life — is undignified and un-pretty. The realities of life and death and day-to-day on a farm, even a small farm, ranges from mundane to tragic to comically unpleasant but rarely resembles the strange "farmhouse chic" we see in the magazines. It's hard to be classically fancy when you have chicken poop on your feet but I hardly ever remembered to put on shoes when I gathered eggs in the chicken house.
Nonetheless, our bushels-of-rotting-peaches excursions were regular life for me, and we would do the same with mostly bad apples in late October or early November. The apple pies were worth it, as was digging into freezer boxes of freshly frozen, tree-ripe peaches in mid-January. The peaches were supposed to be for pies and cobblers but I ate my fair share of them while watching Ducktales or roller skating in circles in the basement. Proximity to the big deep freeze with the Marineland Florida bumper sticker had its advantages.
More than that, I learned — without words — some critical lessons. First, good things come in seasons and no matter how delicious or wonderful those things are, the seasons will pass. If you're lucky, another season will come around again. But the passage of time is a melancholy thing and thus savoring the moment of something "in season" is a special thing indeed. Second, providence and good bounty come with a hell of a lot of work and you'd best know what you're doing.
Third, the best fruit is sometimes the ugliest, the most overlooked, and you can live mighty good on what the less astute and more privileged just throw away. My mom believed, I think, that thriftiness was next to godliness, embodying an inescapably early settler work ethic, one woefully out of place in her otherwise suburban world in which everything, including friendships, was disposable.
Life isn't easy, that much is certain. And the best things in life may not be the prettiest, or last forever, but such things should never be taken for granted. Beneath the facades, beyond the expectations, the things that matter are ugly peaches all.
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