Ahhh, the first peach of summer.

I grew up with a Babcock peach tree in the back yard. Once I got old enough to climb it, or hit peaches down with a stick, I was sticky the rest of the day. Juicy, pink-tinged white flesh once you bit past the dense peach-fuzz, your reward was the sweetest flavor you can imagine.

This is one of the few wonderful memories of a somewhat fraught childhood. I have been searching for that flavor throughout my adulthood. And not just the flavor, the complete and unconscious happiness those peaches represent. My focus on getting a peach and eating it drowning out the abuse, the poverty and the loneliness of abandonment.

More than half a century later, I still search for that flavor, knowing that I will never have it again. But still I search. And though Babcock’s aren’t readily available in the grocery store or even local markets, a nice, tree-ripened peach can transport me to one of my happy places again.