PEACHES

It’s a Friday afternoon in early August, 2025. I’m at my home office desk, tapping away at my Lewis & Clark notes in preparation for the annual history tour I am about to lead two weeks from now. The scene in our home is most familiar: me at my notes – adding, subtracting, modifying for the umpteenth time (I have been doing these tours for the better part of 20 years); Dorothy downstairs, late in the afternoon, reading a novel or maybe stirring things around in the kitchen as she begins preparations for our supper. 

            I hear her feet on the carpeted stairs outside the office door and she enters, bearing a small blue bowl. She’s smiling, radiant with beauty.

            It’s the heart of fruit season here in Walla Walla, and she bears in her hands a bowlful of sliced peaches. They’re fresh peaches, white freestones purchased last weekend at the Farmer’s Market from our favorite grower, Flateau Fruit. I bought them unripe, trusting them to sweeten and grow creamy-soft over the coming days. The Flateau fruit never fails. Peaches are Dorothy’s favorite. An identical bowl awaits her downstairs, but at this moment she wants the pleasure of watching my face when I lift a slice and slide it between my lips. I close my eyes, bite the peach, and gasp. 

            It’s simply unbelievable – a honeyed thing oozing its syrup across my tongue and down my throat. Impossibly juicy and sweet. I cannot imagine a better piece of fruit on the planet. I open my eyes to see her smiling even wider. We both laugh – that laugh of pure pleasure and joy. Like little kids. Having delivered the small dish with its freight of pure deliciousness, she turns quickly away to return downstairs for her own gasp of joy. And I think:

            This moment. This moment. The right now. 

            Everything in life, right here, right now.

            The season so short, life so short. 

            Where does living happen if not in this moment?  

            And a terrible ache comes over me. I am 73 years old. Some time back I broke through the membrane of taking-nothing-for-granted. I am three years retired from teaching, retired from the daily vortex of planning, preparing, rushing, the pressure that keeps every salaried person on edge. The numbing mindlessness that comes with a career. Now I suffer from none of that. Now I think about death all the time. All around me friends and loved ones are falling. I go to sleep thinking across the burdens of my life. I awaken each morning astonished at my good health. Astonished that I live with someone I love, who loves me.

            Who carries a small dish of sliced peaches into our office. So cool, so delicious, so filled with every moment of summer.