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.
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