Peaches and Poems a-plenty

4 September 2022

By ninth grade I (Leah) had moved so much that I decided words were the only thing I could hold on to. Zambia was a year behind us, and it looked like we’d be in Illinois another year before shipping out to France. So I started memorizing poems. A neglected English class anthology offered me Li-Young Lee’s “From Blossoms.”

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward

signs painted Peaches.

 

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

 

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

 

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background, from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

 

I chanted it in my mind at swim practice, the rhythm of a strenuous butterfly stroke matching the cadence of the last stanza. The pool lights were a fluorescent flicker and the sky wintry black. I didn’t want peaches so much as mangos, familiar red dust and the impossible blossom of purple jacarandas. At least I had the words. 

Swimming butterfly might be a good aid to memory. I’d forgotten most of the poem in the years since high school, but two weeks ago our kitchen was piled high with peaches, and wing to wing came tugging at my thoughts. We didn’t have a bowlful of peaches, or two dozen. 

We didn’t have 25 pounds from the Georgia Peach Truck. We had crate after crate, fruit in the hundreds, with an even larger box crowding the counter. 

Our housemate Rachel has a sister-in-law working toward a PhD tied up in fruit trees. Rachel went to help her during a busy harvest weekend. She drove home with peaches. (For tax purposes, those events are not causally connected.) 

These weren’t commercially-grown peaches, picked rock-hard for shelf life and shipping. They were ripe. They were fragrant. Impossibly juicy and impossibly numerous, they overwhelmed the kitchen with abundance and the imperative to do something quickly! That was the line my squirrel brain was taking, at least. Preserve the abundance as quickly and completely as possible—but joy to joy to joy, savor the work as well.  

On Sunday night, I researched recipes and made a mental note to cook at least a double batch of everything. On Monday, I shouldered aside the low-grade panic long enough to write, and then trooped out to the kitchen to blanch perhaps a hundred peaches. (Bring a pot of water to the boil. Cut an X in the bottom of every fruit. Drop them into the water for about a minute, then fish them out into a bowl of cold water. Peel when cool.) 

The first round of blanching provided fruit for a crock of fermented peaches and double batches of both peach jalapeño and bourbon-vanilla peach jam. It didn’t make any noticeable dent in our stacked crates of peaches. So Rachel and Becca and I started giving them away. 

We carted crates of fruit to the schools and labs where we work. We invited friends to help make jam and sent them home with brimming bags. Peaches accompanied me to physical therapy and small group, and still they did not diminish.

Rachel declared Wednesday a day of reckoning. She blanched and canned peach halves for her sister-in-law and Becca peeled and chopped for me while I foolishly began a chutney, a salsa and a fizzy peach brew after 8 pm. I canned till midnight. On Thursday, we had our new friend Hannah over for dinner and I experimented with a Roman take on peaches. Courtesy of the Pass the Flamingo, here it is: 

Peach Patina with Cumin/Wine Sauce

4-5 firm peaches, peeled and pitted
1 cup grape juice
½ cup Port or other sweet wine
¼ cup fish sauce (available at Asian grocery stores)
1 ½ tablespoons powdered cumin
2 tablespoons honey
3-4 sprigs of fresh mint (optional)
Olive oil

Cut peaches into slices and arrange in the bottom of an oiled, oven-safe dish. Bake peaches at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes. While peaches are baking, prepare the sauce. In a saucepan over high heat, reduce grape juice, honey and wine to a syrupy consistency (about 25 minutes) along with mint leaves. Stir continually to prevent burning. Remove mint leaves. Add fish sauce and cumin and reduce, continuing to stir for a few more minutes. Take peaches out of the oven, drizzle with olive oil and pour the sauce over them. Garnish with mint if desired.

(I decreased the fish sauce to something more like an eighth cup.)

Becca said she reserved judgement while making faces that begged to differ. But Hannah and I both enjoyed it, Hannah describing the complexity of flavor as kin to mulled wine. 

Friday was another canning-to-midnight marathon, with all remaining peaches lobbed into a triple batch of vanilla bourbon jam. My phone was peppered with friends’ texts about their success with peach syrup, smoothies and muffins. On Saturday we savored peach jalapeño jam and salsa with friends for my birthday at the Indiana Dunes. Sunday required the kitchen’s cleaning and the labeling of many jars, and vanilla bourbon jam graced the table for Becca’s guests. [table picture]

My squirrel brain is happy to report that we lost only one peach to mold and we now have enough jam to survive a zombie apocalypse. The rest of me is glad at the summer happiness those peaches sent rippling through our community. The jam gives us a way to stir those waters all winter long.

In a way it’s like pottery shows. I remember crashing at Becca’s place in December of 2020, having escaped the near-solitary confinement of grad school to do the writing for her Janus show. It was a few weeks before the opening. I was listening to recorded interviews with our friends to better tell their stories of love-in-the-in-between, while she carved the night sky on a mirror frame. We both had an astonishing amount of work yet to do.

“Who is all this for?” she asked.

“We’re spreading a table in the wilderness.” 

I was a little surprised by my words, but they fit. We didn’t know who would come to the gallery to share the abundance we’d wrought in clay and ink. We couldn’t predict what pieces would sell. We desperately wanted to get the work done, but the crazy hours of collaboration were themselves a fruit to savor. 

Mangoes and jacarandas don’t grow in Indiana—or in Turkey, for that matter. But there are tables to set with words and jam. There are stories to tell and a community to love, from blossom to blossom to sweet impossible blossom.

A minute in the morning.

19th century German botanist Otto Wilhelm Thomé’s rendering of the peach.

A portion of the peaches when they first landed in our house.

A batch of blanched beauties.

Rachel blanched while Becca peeled fruit for double-batch salsa and another round of fermented peaches.

Late night shenanigans had us all laughing while prepping ingredients.

The finished look of Peach Patina — a “Roman take on peaches.”

Canned peaches to the right, more peaches to preserve to the left.

Assembly of ingredients for fermented peaches that went into a crock Becca made. Within three days, we were flushed with fizzy fruit.

Midweek, Leah made a cobbler to save some of the oxidized, sadder-looking fruit.