August Peaches
The heat of august in Vermont is relentless. As a child, august was like the jungle of summer, overrun with lush greenery, cicadas, and mosquitos. There was no respite from the humidity, even when the sun painted the western horizon in the evening. The dusk came alive with peepers and the cicadas droned on in a buzzing chorus.
On these long, sultry days, the river was our religion. My mom, dad, brother, and I would pack canvas bags with towels and books and snacks and drive up the mountain road to the New Haven river, which carried crisp pellucid waters down from the green mountains. All the languid laze from the summer days would be washed away in those waters, and we would be reignited with energy. We watched the trout swim against the current as they explored the dark crevices beneath the boulders lining the river. Their bright scales flashed when they caught the light. We swam until we could not bare the cold any longer, and then we’d lie on towels in the sun until the heat had us returning once again to the river.
We couldn’t visit the river every day. On weekdays my dad returned to his job in construction and my mom had to work cleaning mansions by the lake. My brother and I would go with mom to work often. Her clients didn’t mind when we played in the yard or explored the private dirt roads. Our curiosity was inexhaustible and our imaginations opened doors to unexplored worlds.
On these days we would pass a little farmstead on our drive home. It stood on the side of the road and was run by a family of Mennonites. The women wore long, simple dresses, and they sold homemade jams, fresh vegetables, and peaches. Fifty pound crates of peaches. It was always late august when the peaches came in, right around my birthday, and I can’t say which I looked forward to more. The peaches come in a stamped wooden crate, like something you would see at a fruit stand in the 50s or 60s, shipped in from Pennsylvania. It took two of us to hoist the peaches into the back of the car.
We had to be patient, as the peaches took their sweet time ripening. We knew they were ripe when they smelled sweet and floral, when your fingers bruised the flesh simply by picking up the fruit. The peach needed to be washed to rinse away all the little hairs on the skin, then gently dried so as to not rip the supple skin. There’s nothing quite like a fresh august peach, the fruit dense with concentrated nectar. It tasted like sunlight and honey and flowers. The juice could not be contained and ran down my chin, and the flesh fell away from the pit as easily as a ripe berry falls from the stem.
When we could not eat any more, when the weight of the ripening peaches began crushing those at the bottom of the crate, we would bake. We washed, dried, and sliced each peach. Some became the filling for pies, but the rest we froze for the winter when the memory of sunlight and peaches was a that from distant world.