Back in time

Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall

The peaches are excellent this year, succulent and juicy. White and yellow peaches both have wooed me in the past week with their tartly sweet flavor that melts into the corners of my mouth.

This is a point of nostalgia for me. I’ll admit, over the past few years I have avoided peaches entirely, skirting them in the grocery store and even at the farmers market. ‘They won’t be as good as my dad’s peaches’ is what goes through my mind. Ever since my dad sold his final few acres of Jersey Queens and John Boys in that hideaway south Jersey town, I’ve upheld this opinion. But this year – perhaps because I have grown more aware of the trials and rewards of growing food, I have come back around to the fuzzy fruit that followed me through my childhood and adolescence.

Our old Russian tractor, with orchard behind.

Roadstown, New Jersey - Home of the Ware Chair. That’s what the sign when you entered the town used to say. There isn’t a town really. There used to be a general store, it looks like, and a small town center. But now those buildings have been worn down into barns. They house farm tractors if they’re lucky, or flocks of pigeons if they’ve just been around awhile. I used to go down there and spend a day, or weeks in the summer. I would bring liters of water and packets of Emergen-C to revive me halfway through the day, after the dust and relentless sun began to get to me. My dad would fill the gas tank of the old John Deere or Belarus, and I would jump onboard. It felt like boarding a horse to be honest, saddling up. And then I would sit up there, all day long, driving up and down each row, keeping the Deere’s left tire aligned with the left side of the sod strip down the middle, waking up enough to turn the machine deftly around each hairpin turn. It was five rows at a time – you’d do one and then skip a row on your way back, skip another on your second turn and then fill in the blanks. Every so often I would stand up for a row, feeling tall and flexible on the rumbling mower. And then I would sit down and the rows would keep on going by.

I would sell the excess peaches sometimes. My dad sold most of his peaches to a farmers co-op, Jersey Fruit, but by the end even they were giving him pennies for his produce. I would go out to the orchard and pick all the ripe fruit he had to leave on the trees and reserve a booth at Cowtown, sell it all straight to the consumer for three times what we made through the co-op. Once or twice my mom and I took a dozen boxes to Reading Terminal Market in Philly, set up a table and sold them all quick. We handed out samples, that’s what did it. His peaches were good, honest.

We even branded the business, thanks to Lindsey Fyfe's handiwork.

But then he sold the trees, and the tractors, and the irrigation equipment we had all set up and painstakingly fixed each year – my brother, my dad, and I, and he moved to the city. I haven’t been down there since, though every summer my muscles and my mind still long for it. Hours sitting up there on that John Deere were some of the best I spent through college. I learned a dozen Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs up there, borrowing my dad’s heavy-duty discman and black leather fanny pack. I cleared my mind just going up and down those rows, stopping for rabbits and birds and whatever else I saw.

Peaches aren’t the same when you buy them in the store. I guess they never will be, even though they’re damn good this year. Still, whenever it hails in June or when there’s a drought in July, I think of the peaches. Or the peaches that never were. The peaches that my dad and I would be picking off the trees right now if he still owned those trees way down there in Jersey. And then, if they were ours, they would be the best peaches you ever tasted.