Peach Picking Part II – or, Death by Peaches

Last week’s column described my adventure to a local orchard several years ago. What do you mean you didn’t read my column? Run back to your recycling bin, stat, and retrieve it, will you? What do you mean, you put me in the bottom of the birdcage? I hope you had the decency to put me face down, at least.

Each of my six children, even the non-ambulatory one, had a plastic grocery bag to collect peaches. Each one had filled and stretched the bag far beyond its natural capacity – you know, sort of the way middle-aged women tend to dress for weddings. We returned with 135 peaches in six bags. Notice I didn’t say “about 150 peaches” or “over 100” peaches. I gave you a specific number because we decided to count the booty (no longer referencing women’s wear here) when we came home. Then we came to our senses.

We did not count with the rising elation of an expert angler describing his catch, or a child counting out his coins. It was more with a sense of dread: like the mounting death toll after a disaster strikes. As the numbers rose, so did our dismay. We got to 135. We decided to omit the peaches we had devoured in the orchard with our picnic lunches.

Even though 135 peaches is too much for a family of eight – and mind you, the two youngest were so little that together, they barely had the peach-eating capacity of one small child - I would have been happier if we had brought home 153. Then, I could have felt all good and spiritual about it, because it would have been like the Biblical haul of fish. Remember when the resurrected Jesus used His divine Fishfinder to tell the disciples exactly where to cast their nets, and they brought up 153 large fish without breaking the nets? I might have sensed some spiritual insight if we had bagged 153 peaches. Instead, I felt like some depraved (deprived?) peach glutton.


I had no plans except to eat peaches and make my children eat them.


It was not too many a year ago,
In an orchard near to me,
That we picked too, too many peaches
That hung right off the trees;
And soon we were consumed by the peaches we’d brought
And were forced to eat them to be set free.

--- With apologies to Edgar Allan Poe and “Annabel Lee”


My culinary vocabulary did not include canning, preserving, or freezing. We were just going to have to eat our way out of this peach avalanche. I now realize I could have cut the peaches, sprinkled a little sugar on them, and put them in the freezer, but I didn’t know this then. How much more memorable for my kids was the summer we shall refer to as “Death by Peaches.”


We didn’t know many others in our subdivision, so sharing peaches would have been a fine and neighborly gesture. That, too, was too normal a thing to do. I’m ashamed to tell you that I didn’t share a single peach with a single soul. My mental facilities always work better in reverse gear. At the time, all we did was eat and count peaches.


Our glut of peaches required everyone to eat their daily quota. It was like a rationing system in reverse: you had to eat three to five peaches a day if you wanted to eat anything else. Of course, we had only picked the plumpest, ripest, and juiciest peaches, so we had little time in which to accomplish this feat. It didn’t matter how it got done, so long as they were eaten. I was setting the rules; let someone else figure out the logistics.


They could eat their afternoon’s dose of peaches prior to enjoying lunch, or they could enjoy it as their lunch: peaches on your pizza, or peaches with your pizza. For some variety, try peanut butter and peach sandwiches along with a peach smoothie.


My kids really got into the kitchen during our peach-capades. They made peach cobbler, peach pie, peach glaze, peach bread, and peach turnovers. We tried the blanching/boiling technique that was supposed to help the peels just slip right off, but all it did was turn our peaches into big gray balls. I don’t remember how we finished that batch of peaches off, because it wouldn’t look too appetizing in a peach cobbler.


Toward the end, our peaches, like little aging people, had become a little too soft and a little too wrinkly, with mysterious bruises here and there. No matter, with a knife the blemishes could be excised. Just think of it as a little botanical botox. At long last, we finished that 135th peach. If we were not so bloated with peaches, we might have been proud and celebrated.


Later that fall, the ladies’ group at church announced a trip to an apple orchard. “Ooh!” squealed my youngest daughter, who was about four years old then. “Could we go peachpicking for apples next time?”

Peach Picking – or, Why Moderation is Not my Middle Name

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...