A Final Thought: Life’s a Peach

Growing up in South Georgia, I did not appreciate a fresh peach. Peach orchards were commonplace, and peaches themselves were scary to a small child. They were hairy—or rather, fuzzy—and the pit would bleed red into the light-orange flesh surrounding it, looking like blood.

That’s why I preferred canned peaches “in heavy syrup.”

No hair. No blood.

Today, of course, canned peaches are blasphemy. They taste nothing like peaches. My tastes have changed, and I now cherish a fresh peach, but since moving to Ohio, they seem hard to come by. As a kid in Georgia, we would pick them right off the tree, but here we have to wait until local farmers markets have them.

Some are grown in Northeast Ohio at farms like Rittman Orchards, Bauman Orchards, Quarry Hill Orchards and Monroe’s Orchards. Others are shipped in from Georgia and South Carolina during the season and from California year-round. (Although Georgia is known as “the Peach State,” South Carolina actually produces more peaches.)

Last week I finally had a delicious peach. It came from Szalay’s Farm & Market in the Cuyahoga Valley. I had bought the peaches a week earlier. That’s the secret: Let them sit on the windowsill until they ripen a bit more, becoming soft and highly aromatic. Hold one up to your nose and breathe in deeply.

It’s heaven.

Peaches are like pears. They’re perfect for about 20 minutes. Before then, they’re unripe. After that, they start to rot.

Timing is everything.

My peach last week was perfect—sweet, juicy, succulent, sinful. Close your eyes when you eat such a peach and think of Coca-Cola, which originated in Atlanta. Better yet, the next time you take a sip of Coke, think of peaches. You may come to believe, as I do, that peaches are a key part of the beverage’s legendary secret formula.

By the way, I have a cousin named Peaches, who lives in Alabama.

She’s sweet, too.

Ever since I ate that peach from Szalay’s, I’ve been thinking about fruit as a metaphor for a human life: We begin as a tiny bud, but in time we open into the world as a delicate blossom with little to offer but our beauty, tenderness, vulnerability, and infinite potential.

As childhood fades and falls away, we discover that we are fruit, with purpose and ambition. Yet we are green and bitter, and remain this way for most of our lives. We may grow larger with experience and the accumulation of resources, but inside we remain hard and sour.

Eventually, if the fates grant us the time, our aura takes on a beautiful golden hue, and we become soft and sweet, tender, and plump with generosity.

It is at this moment we realize the true purpose of our lives: to allow ourselves to be devoured, to give ourselves away completely to our art, to our cause, to our true loves, even to strangers. Otherwise, we risk falling from the Tree of Life undevoured, taking our sweet succulence with us to the dark forest floor, where we rot slowly among all the others who chose the same path.



But all is not lost, for even in this rotting death, our seed, our pit, the mysterious inner spark of being we have come to call the soul, returns to the rich soil of creation, where, as the ancients have promised all along, we are given the chance to live again.

Mitch@MimiVanderhaven.com