Peach

It’s been a glorious season for peaches. They’ve been juicy and sweet, toothsome, fragrant, yielding yet still firm even when they are ripe. They taste of sunshine. Geoff says the perfect way to eat a peach is leaning over the sink with your sleeves rolled up, and 2023 hasn't disappointed.

This year, as I recovered from surgery I found myself unable to drive out to the farm stands when the harvesting started. Thankfully, my sister in law Sonya devoted a whole late August Saturday to making sure I didn’t miss out. She picked me up, drove us an hour out of town, and enthusiastically humoured me as I had us stopping at multiple orchard fruit stands in my quest to retrieve the most perfect baskets of peaches possible. I can happily report that our mission was a complete success. I moaned in delight when the burst of flavour hit my tongue. The taste of a peach is an invocation, a magic spell, a memory portal.

When I was growing up, every summer my mom canned peaches in brandy, and I was her trusty assistant. We'd drop the peaches in a huge pot of boiling water then pull them out quickly, sliding their skins off and slicing them into melamine salad bowls. The steam would fog up the kitchen window and fill the house with the sweetest of smells. She'd use long silvery tongs to take the sterile jars out of the oven, filling each one three quarters full of fruit and then ladling hot sugar and lemon syrup on top. I'd get to measure and add three tablespoons of brandy to each jar, and use the smaller tongs to pull the lids out of boiling water and carefully lower them into place. We'd listen for the loud pop of the lids sealing summer in. A ritual labour to mark the end of the season. At Christmas, we gave jars away to all our family friends, saving a dozen or so in the crawl space under the stairs for us to eat throughout the winter.

Rarely, however, did we eat fresh peaches. In North Bay in the 1980s, the peaches we bought at the A&P or the IGA had travelled too far to taste anything like sunshine. Their texture was unpredictable, they were almost always underripe, often as hard as green pears. In North Bay in the 1980s, we didn't have the internet to tell us how to ripen peaches in a paper bag on the counter, or to never put unripe peaches in the refrigerator. In North Bay in the 1980s, peaches were for canning only. When my mom moved to southern Ontario in 2020, the fresh local peaches of August were a revelation to her.

'This isn't even the same fruit', she marvelled. 'I can’t believe it.’ She ate so many that year she made herself sick.

The first time I had a real craving for fresh peaches, at least that I can remember, was the summer of 1995. I was pregnant with a child I wasn’t going to keep, living in a rent controlled apartment and working in the basement of the Canadian Stage company as a telemarketer. I had just graduated from theatre school. While all my classmates were looking ahead to their bright futures and stepping into their budding careers, I was stuck in the present tense. I was sleepwalking through my days subsisting on toast, fruit juice and Michelina microwave dinners. I was reading three books a week and waiting by a phone that no longer rang. I'd come home from work, shower and lie down to sweat alone on my single mattress, the ticking of the second hand on the wall clock my only company through the long, lonely, worried nights.

The craving for peaches came on suddenly one morning. It was so strong that I spent my pre-work hours that day visiting every neighbourhood grocery store I knew of, from the giant No Frills on Parliament to the greengrocer in Jamestown, all the way down to the Rabba at Sherbourne and Front. There were no peaches to be had. In retrospect, it being June might have had something to do with that. Sourcing off season fresh produce was a very different proposition in 1995 than it is now, when berries are flown five thousand miles and every produce aisle offers a dozen kinds of apples any time of the year. In Cabbagetown in 1995, there were no peaches to be had. That afternoon, arriving at work, I recounted the day's saga to my workmates as I downed a peach Snapple and settled in to make my quota of calls.

The very next day, my friend Michelle, who I'd gone to school with, showed up with a whole bag of peaches for me. ‘You said you had a craving, so I got you some.’ She was one of only two friends at the time with a car. She lived near Casa Loma, and that day she drove around to the tony supermarkets of that neighbourhood until she found what I'd been craving. In Forest Hill in 1995, you could already get any fresh fruit that came to mind. I didn’t know that, I was amazed at her conjuring.

I don't particularly remember the taste of those peaches. I do, however, remember eating them all in a day or so. I remember how loved I felt, how touched I was by Michelle's act of kindness. In a time of my life where I felt as though I was stumbling in the dark, uncertain and afraid of what lay ahead, those peaches were like stars in a midnight sky, orienting me to the moment, guiding me in the direction of connection, generously inviting me to contemplate their beauty.

Every one of these remembered peaches is a gift of sweetness. Every one of them has been a miracle, formed by the timeless alchemy of seed and sunlight and rain, and kept fresh and alive through the power of memory and the sweet sense of being loved.