Mosaic is The Public’s Radio podcast on immigration and identity in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. It features a series of community essays on a variety of topics. This one is by Dr. Michael Fine of Scituate, Rhode Island.
I’m lucky to live on the same street as Sunset Orchards, eighteen acres of apple and peach trees in Scituate that keep us in fruit in the late summer and long into the fall. Matt and Katy, who run the orchard, are the light of the neighborhood. Matt grew up on our street and took over the orchard about five years ago from other neighbors who had farmed the orchard for over a hundred years.
There is nothing like living here and seeing first, peach and apple trees in bloom in late April and early May, and then seeing the peaches and then the apples develop on the trees. The fruit starts as tiny green nubbins, and then grows, the peaches first green then yellow and red, while the little green apples become red and huge on the bent-over branches laden with heavy fruit ready to be picked.
I love the tart apples of late summer, their tang and crunch as you bite into them, and the pies we make from them.
But this year I discovered white peaches for the first time. White peaches are so sweet and so delicate that they can’t really be shipped ripe. Their flesh is easily bruised, their skin so delicate that it rips the moment it is touched. The peaches themselves are so juicy that you have to eat them with particular caution, and even then they are likely to make a mess of your hands, face and clothing.
But they are also impossibly sweet and bursting with juice, bursting with the intense pleasure of the moment, of summer, the fullness of what the earth can produce for us. There is nothing quite like eating a white peach that’s completely ripe, right off the tree.
And then, like each peach, the summer is gone. It was here. It is gone. It was so good while it lasted.
No one lives forever. I’m torn between the sadness that I feel about losing what was here and is now gone, the delight of remembering just how good it was, and the anticipation of what comes next: first yellow, orange and red, the colors of the fall and the huge heavy yellow glow of an autumn moon, then the crisp light on new snow, then the burnt sweetness of maple sugaring in late winter, leading to the lime green of new leaves and the yellow of the forsythia blossoms against the snow in early springtime – and then seeing the apple and peach blossoms in the orchard in the spring again.
I’m grateful that I get to live where there are trees, where there is an orchard and people who know how to care for those trees, so I can look forward to tasting those white peaches at the end of summer again in the year to come.
Dr. Michael Fine is writer, community organizer and family physician. To learn more about his books and short stories, click here. To submit your own essay or to learn more about Mosaic, email Community Producer Pearl Marvell at mosaiccommunity@thepublicsradio.org.
