My coworker, Carol Brigden, had been eating a peach a day. Carol is one of those uber-healthy women who doesn’t take any vitamins: she eats them by carefully selecting the foods she consumes. I, on the other hand, buy junk food in bulk for my children, and then, as a panacea to compensate for my nutritional negligence, also toss in the whole gamut of Gummy Bears for kids: vitamins, calcium, and fish oil. You know, just in case their bodies aren’t extracting anything of value from the cartons of popcorn and peanut butter granola bars that weigh down my cart.
I feel as if I spend equal amounts of money on vitamins as on real food. Maybe these products should be relabeled “Dummy Vitamins” for people like me. Am I the only one that has the lingering suspicion that maybe, just maybe, there is absolutely nothing of nutritional value in these adorably stamped, squishy, supplements? What if they are made from the identical recipe as those sour neon gummy crawlers, but just smashed into bear shapes, and then packaged in bottles that are priced five times more than the candy. Would the real candy please stand up?
Carol also happens to exercise regularly and vigorously. Hailing from South Africa, she says everyone who is anyone back home is athletic. This might explain why Carol the figure to rival an athletic sixteen-year-old’s, even though she could be a grandma any day now. I, too, believe in exercise, but my efforts tend to concentrate on specific areas, such as on building a healthy jawline: chewing up food or chewing out children. This sort of exercise can leave you looking more and more like Howard Cosell.
Her daily peach-ification was the result of what Carol called an overzealous Farmer's Market purchase, but she has no idea what true peach-picking zeal can produce, because she was able to consume all of her peaches within a week. Real zeal is the time I took my kids peach picking several years ago.
My friend Holly Schoenhoff had organized an outing to Hartland Orchard for the ladies of our church that summer. Holly is one of those amazing women who, despite having two young rambunctious boys, can find time to organize things. Every once in a while, we would get an email that Holly had tackled some corner of the house, and had discovered she had an extra copy of a children’s classic. Who would like it? Or, her Erich or Ben had outgrown a coat, and could anyone use a nice, puffy green hooded jacket in a 3T? (She is thoughtful enough to ask this just as the air is getting nippy in the fall, when you could really use it, and not in the middle of July, when just thinking about coats could cause you to faint.)
Holly is also something of an educating domestic diva. She not only grinds wheat, but also makes time to invite friends over so they and their young children can join in on the delights of baking a fresh loaf of bread. She also happens to be an avid photographer and a charming writer. I’m not anywhere near as organized as Holly, but she lets me be her friend anyway.
We went to Hartland Orchard on a – and I apologize here, because I must use strong language – stinking, hot day. Even my kids’ faces turned red.
I thought this trip would be a great opportunity to show the kids that fruit could be found hanging off of trees. I gave each of my kids a bag to fill. My youngest daughter, then 4, squealed at the sight of fruit bursting from the trees. My youngest son rode in a backpack carrier. I can’t recall if he squealed or cried; I just remember having a sticky back afterwards. Of course, he had to have his own bag too. I carried it for him. Despite all their previous food-procuring excursions had taught them, my children learned that fruit does not grow in highly polished, perfect pyramids in super-air-conditioned grocery stores.
We thrilled in the joys of walking through orchards we had neither sweated nor toiled to tend, and plucked the ripened fruit right off the trees. It was important that we fill all six bags with nature’s bounty. People who know me claim I don’t know how to do things in moderation, which is why it’s always such a delight to meet new people. They tend to have much better opinions of me. They don’t know that I can finish off an entire bag of jelly beans (with real fruit juice!) in one night. Peaches, however, are a different matter. You cannot eat all the peaches in one night.
One-hundred thirty-five peaches. We came home with 135 peaches. What was I thinking? More precisely, “Was I thinking?” I know exactly how many peaches we had because one of the first activities we had at home was to count them. It would not be the last. More on peach gluttony next week...
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