The Smell of Peaches
“Warring Landscapes” by Ellen Harrold
The sign above the produce section in our grocery store boasts fruit and vegetables from local farms. I try to reconcile this message with the waxy skin of the tomato in my hand. The tomatoes in my garden aren’t quite ready, and my husband wants a BLT, but I can’t bring myself to put this one in the basket. I put it down. He’ll have to eat something else. I wander over to the peaches and pick one up. The skin is soft and fuzzy, but when I press my thumb into the surface, it feels rock hard. I place it back into the sea of cold hard fruit and notice a hunger forming in the pit of my stomach. Hunger for food that has been picked when it is ready, not a moment before. There is something about seeing a living organism nurtured to the point of perfection.
In the yellow ranch style house of my youth, I was surrounded by peach orchards in every direction, a circumference of perfection. Freestone peaches, so sweet I tried to lick every drop of juice that dripped onto my hands before it slid down my arms. The secret to their sweetness was intense dry heat that settled in the California Central Valley. An extreme heat almost unbearable for humans. Heat that baked the trees until they produced a fragrance that could be smelled for miles. A gentle pull was all that was needed to coax the rosy flesh-toned fruit off the trees. Some didn’t need coaxing and just fell into our hands. Whatever we didn’t eat right away, my mother canned or baked into jams, jellies, and cobblers. She made peach ice cream in an old ice-cream maker and dried the sliced peaches outside on racks.
***
My mother knelt in the garden beside the orchard, her hair pulled back by a blue bandana, tugging weeds from the soil until sweat filmed her eyes and heat permeated her body. This memory surfaced as I gazed at a photo of me holding my baby brother. I’m sitting on the back step with my arms wrapped around his soft little body, my five-year-old chin resting on his shoulder, and I’m wearing my favorite green dress. That same dress appears in my kindergarten photo, and again, sleeping in a cardboard box, and again, in the back seat of our blue Dodge Colt. It was threadbare, and my mother had to fight me to take it off. When the dress began to fit me like a tunic, it mysteriously disappeared.
The view from the front yard wasn’t that different; orchards lined the highway for as far as one could see. Occasionally, big trucks that transported fruit to the grocery stores and canneries drove by. I watched them pass with round fruit piled high and wondered Why don’t they cover it? They’re gonna roll off. Years later, on a trip to Yosemite, our family got stuck in traffic because of a spill from a big truck that had lost a load of tomatoes. The highway patrol had to shut down one lane so crews could come in to clean up the lake of asphalt-simmered marinara sauce.
When I watched those trucks drive by, I didn’t know the fruit they carried tasted different than that from our orchard. I didn’t know the fruit on those trucks was harvested sooner than its peak so it wouldn’t spoil during transport. I didn’t know until many years later when we had to buy our peaches from the grocery store, that consumers were being fooled by perfect-looking still life produce. Instead of biting into a warm, sweet globe of goodness, they were getting a grainy-textured fruit void of taste. I also didn’t know that some fruit didn’t make it onto the trucks. If it was bruised or blemished, or even the wrong size, it was thrown out. I couldn’t imagine the beautiful fruit on our trees being tossed in the trash.
***
As I wander through the produce section, I consider all the fruits and vegetables that have been deemed unworthy for consumers. I notice a young man eyeing a head of romaine lettuce. He is probably thinking about preparing a nice crisp salad for tonight’s dinner. Anyone who has watched produce perish in the refrigerator drawer knows the cycle. You have the best of intentions to chop up the lettuce and prepare a healthy meal, but you are tired after sitting in traffic or helping your child who is struggling with homework, so you get take-out. The next night you have stew, and salad doesn’t really go with stew, and now it’s the weekend and you’re going out with friends. Now you’ve waited too long and the once-crisp lettuce drapes over your hand like a wilted petal. No one has time for sad lettuce so you toss it in the trash and vow to be better about food waste. Now think about all the other fruits and vegetables that wither away until they get tossed. All that waste goes to the landfill.
About 16% of total food wasted in the U.S. is from farms. I thought it would be more, but the main culprit is kitchen waste. Think about that head of lettuce. I wanted to be better about food waste, so I decided to sign my family up to receive our produce from an organization that rescued fruits and vegetables. Boxes arrived weekly with produce that would have been rejected by supermarket standards. We tried vegetables we might never have purchased, like purple potatoes and dandelion greens. We laughed at some of the imperfections: a two-legged carrot, a potato that looked like a bum. We had apples that were too small, but just as sweet as their larger cousins. We had peaches that were too ripe to transport, and when I bit into them the juice that ran down my hand was just as sweet as I remembered.
***
In the photo of me holding my brother, I wasn’t thinking about food waste. I was counting down the minutes until I would be able to jump into the above-ground pool in our backyard. For that, I gladly took off my green dress.
I spent hours in the pool, and often helped watch my brother, pushing him in his floaty while my mother worked in the garden. Every once in a while, she came over and peered over the edge to check on us. Eventually, unable to tolerate the heat any longer, she took off her gardening gloves and jumped into the pool fully clothed.
When my father jumped in, he looked like a giant in the shallow water. He lifted me high above his head and dropped me like a cannonball. I splashed down, touching bottom and launched up through the surface like a rocket. Then I swam back over to him for another go. Dad crouched down in the water with his legs bent and I crawled up into his lap. I could feel the hairs on his legs and the coarse texture of his canvas bathing trunks. When my parents got out, I rested my head on the aluminum edging and let my legs float up behind me.
From that angle, I could see the goat enclosure beneath the shade of the tall oak trees. Ricky, our buck, and Angel, our milk provider, were kept in separate pens. When I went into Angel’s pen, I stayed behind my father so she wouldn’t headbutt me, but when she tried that with my father, he just put his palm on the front of her head and pushed back. “She’s just playing!” he said.
The peach trees had lost their leaves by the time Dad put Angel in the pen with Ricky, and I watched as she ran along the perimeter, her eyes wide and frantic until Ricky caught up to her. Angel just froze while Ricky jumped on her back end and made jerking motions. When I asked why Ricky was on Angel’s back, Dad said Ricky was just having some fun. I didn’t think it looked like fun, and Angel sure didn’t look like she was having fun either, the way her eyes stared forward and her tongue hung out the side of her mouth. On Easter Sunday, Angel had her first kid, a fluffy creature with wobbly legs that we named Easter.
I didn’t see my father put Angel in the pen with Ricky again, but I do remember the day he put Ricky in the back of his truck and said Ricky was going to live somewhere else. Many years later, when I was in 4-H, I learned about auctions, and I think that’s where Dad took him. I wasn’t particularly attached to Ricky, so it wasn’t much of a loss. I don’t think Angel missed him either.
***
When it was too hot, but not time to swim, I had my bedroom to retreat to. It was painted in pale yellow with a full-sized brass bed and pink bedspread that I jumped on regularly. In one corner of the room was my dresser and a small bookcase, and in the other was a lime green, multileveled doll house in which I acted out grand family gatherings. I’m sure there was more than one figurine, but the only one I can remember is the mother. She had a short pixie cut and wore a faded red house dress. I recently looked up “jointed figurines” and Renwal dolls popped up. There was the rest of the family, a husband in a blue suit and two young children. The girl is wearing a yellow dress and the look on her face is of a child who has never bitten into a sun-ripened peach. Her brother looks much the same, his vacant eyes staring into the distance. I spent hours with these figurines trying to give them both the life I knew and the life I wanted. They sat down at the table together for meals. The father read the son and daughter books, while the mother, because she wasn’t dressed for working in the garden, prepared delicious meals in the kitchen. And since their faces couldn’t change to express emotion, I changed mine. The father showed appreciation when he said What a delightful meal you made. I might have to go for seconds! And when the parents were in the bedroom the husband was gentle when he said, I understand if you want to be alone right now. Let me dim the light for you. And then he pulled the covers up around the mother’s shoulder.
The Renwal house was sterile, controlled, unsusceptible to the unpleasantries and complications of life. There was no family tree from which disease or sickness could travel. There were only four lifeless figurines.
***
Unlike the figurines in my dollhouse, peaches are susceptible to disease. Our neighbor, the only neighbor, tended the peach orchard with his tractor. I watched as Orville drove between trees tilling the soil, stopping here and there to inspect more closely. I now know he was looking for signs of peach leaf curl. Caused by a fungus that sleeps in the tree trunk and in dead leaves during winter, it resurfaces in the spring when new life is starting to form. He may also have been looking for signs of root rot, a disease that lies unseen beneath the surface. The tree looks otherwise healthy until it is too late and leaves start dropping. Another disease, brown rot, affects the blossoms, branches and fruit of the peach tree. Left untreated, the disease spreads to the rest of the orchard and the trees fail to produce.
Orville drove to the far side of the orchard, stopping at the ditch, a long stretch of murky water, to check the levels. Sometimes I walked from our driveway out onto the side of the highway and a few steps up the road where I could look out at how far the ditch extended, but I could never see the end. The section closest to me was full of tall grass, old tires, and trash that often found its way from the highway into the stagnant water. One summer, when the mercury climbed into triple digits, my aunt and her boyfriend came for a visit. He peeled off his shirt and jumped into the ditch to cool off while my mother watched in horror. I don’t remember much about the boyfriend, but he didn’t become part of our family.
Orville seemed to be on that tractor all the time. He wore the same button-down shirt every day along with a flat brimmed hat that kept the sun off his face. One morning, he came to our door, holding his hat to his chest. He looked down at his work boots and explained to my mother that one of our ducks had found its way under his tractor. He pointed to the baby pool we had set up for the chicks and said it’s over there, sunken into the deep tire tracks. Somehow, the duck was squashed like an accordion, the head sunk down into its body with no blood, all intact. There was no burial or ceremony. I think my father just threw it in the trash. I don’t remember feeling too torn up about it. That was just the way things were.
***
Our house was separated from the highway by a long white fence and a giant oak tree that held a swing. There is a picture of me wearing a beige, fleece-lined jacket, swinging high above piles of orange golden leaves. My dark hair is cut square around my face and I’m sporting a broad smile that shows off my missing front tooth. I peer closely into the eyes of my six-year-old self, trying to see if I can find signs of trauma or distress, but all I see is a well fed, happy child.
Any rot that had found its way into my growing body lurked beneath the surface for many years. I didn’t have Orville or anyone else looking for the signs that I was sick beneath my six-year-old smile, so there were no identifiable symptoms to treat. We’re not talking about cancer or some other illness. We’re talking about the ways things weren’t discussed, but kept quiet or outright denied. We’re talking about the shame of a young woman who has had a daughter out of wedlock, and the shame of a young man who has seen his mother mistreated by other men. Together, their shame infected our family. It was the reason my father treated my mother the way he did. And I believe it is why he treated me the way he did, too.
Unlike my dollhouse, our house had a hallway, a long narrow hallway that led to three bedrooms. I see myself standing there and hear a baby crying. It’s my brother and he’s shaking the baby gate that keeps him from wandering out of his room. There’s another sound coming from my mother’s room, her pleading for my father to stop. My brother’s face is red with salty old tear trails that have dried behind newly formed ones, and when he reaches his arms out for me, I try to pick him up, but I’m not tall enough and he’s too heavy. I don’t know how to open the gate so I tell him, “It’s okay, I’ll go get mom. It’s okay.” As I approach her bedroom door that is slightly ajar, the pleas have ceased and she is quiet. From where I stand, I can see my father touching my mother. And it’s uncomfortably familiar.
I want to push the discomfort away, smash the wall into something ugly. Gripping an orange crayon tight in one hand, I spread my arms wide and run through the hallway. Now, the walls are no longer white, and my brother has stopped crying. Entertained by my rage, he rests his chin on the top of the baby gate and laughs.
In the nights that follow, I imagine a caveman looming at the foot of my bed. Afraid to move past him to go to the bathroom, I just wet my sheets.
Other nights I brave the scary image and run into my parents’ room to curl up next to my father as he sleeps with his back to my mother.
To say that I was abused would not be a complete account of my childhood, and not the story I want to tell. My parents understood the value of working the land and raising animals with the intention of feeding their family. They gave me the language of fruits, vegetables, and animal husbandry which gave me an appreciation of where our food comes from. They nourished and loved me the best they could. But I was also susceptible to the rot that had already spread through the roots of my family tree.
***
I didn’t think it was unusual to know the different varieties of peaches or other fruits and vegetables until I met my husband who grew up with the commercially canned version. To him a peach was just a peach. The label on the can didn’t say Freestone or Doughnut. It said Peaches in water or syrup. He also didn’t know about two of California’s most beloved foods, the artichoke and the avocado, and I had to struggle to understand how anyone could make it to adulthood without that basic knowledge.
To me, the peach is the Freestone and the Clingstone and the hundreds of varieties that have blossomed from each. It is the planting, the nurturing and the harvest, a source of livelihood for many. It is the difference between letting a peach stay on the tree until it is ready to eat versus picking it too soon. It is the inevitable conversation about how we feed one another.
It is being able to see the signs of illness before it is too late.
About the Author
Alicia Clinton grew up in the diverse landscapes of the CA Central Valley and the Santa Cruz Mountains before raising a family of her own in the Bay Area. She is passionate about the role of place in shaping one’s identity, and believes everyone should have access to fresh produce. A recent New England transplant, she is now trying to figure out if she can grow a peach tree in her own backyard.
About the Artist
Ellen Harrold is an artist focused on the human connection to science and nature. A core aspect of her practice is using painting, drawing, text, and textiles to explore the connection between decay and renewal in the world around us. She is currently focused on how scientific understanding was and continues to be understood through the lens of art and storytelling. She has taken part in exhibitions such as Cause Célèbre with the Oobleck Collective (2022), The Medical Humanities Across Time with Obliquity Medical Humanities Collective (2023), and Colour with the Glasgow Gallery of Photography (2023). She has recently published visual works in New Feathers Anthology, Honeyguide Literary, and Paddler Press. She has also published her first book Aesthetics and Conventions of Medical Art with Boom Graduates.