My Heaven Will Smell Like A Peach

This post is not going to be a recipe.  It's going to be an ode to the most beautiful and tasty fruit in the world, the peach.  For me, there is nothing in the food universe more sensuous, so lovely, so pleasing as a fresh, fully ripe peach.  NOTHING.

We live in a world where fruit is flown around the world to land on our tables.  Although it's nice to see apples and peaches and berries year round, they pale facsimiles of what a fresh fruit, picked at peak ripeness  is.  The fruit we get out of season in the grocery is generally picked in a less-than-ripe state and then packed and shipped in an environment to discourage ripening until it gets to the destination.  Sometimes this means that it has been shipped in a nitrogen environment.  Sometimes it's deeply chilled.  Overall, it's in stasis until it's unpacked and put on the table for you to buy.  Many fruits stop ripening when they are picked.  They will rot, but the chemical development that is ripeness will never happen and this means that the fruit will not taste ripe ever.

I remember when my grandparents planted their peach trees.  I thought I liked peaches OK.  Being a child of the 70s and 80s, we didn't see many peaches in the grocery.  The technologies to ship them well didn't exist.  The main way I saw them was in a can.  They were OK, but I think I mostly queued in on the sugar in that heavy syrup.  Where I grew up, peaches didn't grow well, as the soil was too heavy and wet.  When we moved to far north east Texas, the soil and climate was very amenable to growing peaches, so in went the peach trees on my grandparents' 5 acre plot.  They didn't plant many, just 4-5.  They had one come up in the compost heap.  They didn't have the heart to cut it down, so that one grew up too.  After a couple of years, the fruit began to come in.  That summer, standing in their garden/orchard, I had the experience that changed my life.

I went out with my Pawpaw to pick the peaches.  He reached up and plucked the first ripe peach.  He looked at me and smiled in a way that now seems like the grin of a happy boy.  He took out his pocket knife and sliced into its soft, lovely flesh.  I remember the juice running between his fingers and dripping to the ground.  The smell reached me almost immediately and I slavered like Pavlov's dog.  He then did the most generous thing and handed me the first slice.  I popped it into my mouth and had one of those transcendent experiences that each of us has at those lucky times when your senses are overloaded and the happiness in sharing an experience with a loved one comes together to make your soul sing.  That peach was warm from the sun.  That peach was sweet and tart and fragrant. That peach was love between grandfather and granddaughter.  That peach, right then, was the world.

We shared that peach right then and there and talked about how peaches were the best thing in the world.  We would have other discussions about how X fruit or Y veggie were the best in the world as we noshed on it, standing in the garden, but I honestly think the discussion on the peach was the most heart-felt, at least for me.

Over the years, we picked a lot of peaches at the peak of their perfection.  Each peach was perfect, despite the bug bites and odd shapes because each one was delicious and a little reminder of that moment in the garden when my grandfather and I shared the world.  We would take those peaches in the house to Mamaw and she would start the process of preserving them.  She canned a few, but mostly she liked to freeze them.  The process was easy, in the grand scheme of things, and let us enjoy a wonderful peachy moment all year long.

I miss my grandparents very much.  I miss working in the garden with them and the slow, easy conversation and sharing of experience that happened there.  Every time I taste a really good peach, I am transported to those times when we were together and shared the world in a blushing fuzzy orb.  That's why, when I go to the halls of my forebearers, it will be warm, with soft breezes and smell of peaches.

Here is a link to another site that promotes preserving your own food.  They have links to help you find pick-your-own-produce type farms.  They have some good information for preserving fresh peaches for your family: http://www.pickyourown.org/peachesfreezing.htm

And here are instruction on how to do individual quick frozen peach slices, another great method: http://www.edibleperspective.com/home/2011/9/18/how-to-freeze-peaches.html