Excerpts from Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons On My Family Farm

"Sun Crest is one of the last remaining truly juicy peaches. When you wash that treasure under a stream of cooling water, your fingertips instinctively search for the gushy side of the fruit. Your mouth waters in anticipation. You lean over the sink to make sure you don’t drip on yourself. Then you sink your teeth into the flesh, and the juice trickles down your cheeks and dangles on your chin. This is a real bite, a primal act, a magical sensory celebration announcing that summer has arrived.

The experience of eating a Sun Crest peach automatically triggers a smile and a rush of summer memories. Eating a Sun Crest reminds us of the simple savory pleasures of life."

"My dust is a fine powder. The soil is a sandy loam that would be a chef’s delight. Add war to the earth and create a rich roux, thick but pliable. Stir, and the air will be filled with a rich aroma of turned earth. Beat the ground with a disk, and the topsoil stands like sifted flour awaiting flavoring.

Without water, my ground is ripe for dust. In the heat of summer, a dust cloud follows all movement. Walking creates delicate billows, tiny dirt particles take flight and dance around my boots. I monitor Jake chasing a rabbit by the speeding column of dust suspended in his wake. A truck driving along the field’s edge becomes coated with a frosting of dirt.

I work my fields according to the dust. No dust suggests that the soil is too wet; tractor tires will compact the ground and crush the dirt particles together, causing farm equipment to scar the land with cementlike impressions.

Erratic puffs of dust suggest that the ground is too dry, the earth baked so hard that little can break through the crust. Disks and cultivators bounce over the parched surface, pulverizing the thin topsoil without penetrating the root zones. A battered and abused layer of dirt is left behind, bared to winds that scatter particles high into the air.

The dust layers on my eyelashes. Blinking creates miniature clouds before my eyes. Even my unexposed skin wears a fine undergarment of dust; it penetrates most every crevice of my body. I’ve found dust in places I could only see in a mirror. When body moisture mixes with this dust, little streaks appear on my skin and my clothes. The combination generates an uncomfortable friction.

I lick my lips often when working in the dust. It has a delicate flavor, quiet yet seasoned with a certain tanginess. Growing juicy peaches and grapes amid these conditions seems like a contradiction, yet the dust tempers the character of my fruits. My Sun Crest peaches are sweet but not like candy. My grapes have a delicate taste, light and almost surprising. They both perform well in my soils. My land is balanced, and her dust complements my labor the way a subtle dry wine adds to a meal."

"I get superstitious in late summer. With harvest so close I try not to do things out of the ordinary. I talk out loud a lot, as if I’m bargaining with nature. I’ll ask the weather to cooperate, the worms to hold off a few weeks, the trees to pump up the fruit a little bigger this year, the vines to avoid water stress until after harvest. I feel grateful.

Most people think farmers give thanks after harvest, like the Pilgrims. I believe right before harvest, when the farm is the most vulnerable and exposed, we become the most grateful. I’m humbled to realize in a few hours or days an entire crop can be lost. My gratitude becomes an act of submission as well as a type of freedom. I’m guided by an absolute faith in nature during the final hours preceding harvest. Instead of problems to solve, I can work only in awe of the natural mystery of farming."

"In the fog I can hear the voices of farmers before me. Once I believed their old stubborn ways had no place in the progressive world of modern farming. But now they sing of traditions that have a place in my winter season more than ever.

Two wind socks flutter in the shifting fog. In Japanese, the wind is call kami, with an honorific sama often added. Wind is respected and revered, kamisama becomes a spirit that’s alive. I can see that spirit in a wind sock, the energy captured for a moment in a dance of colors, then released as the tail flaps and waves.

Even in winter there is life on the farm. I feel something sacred, a meaning added to my work and my peaches and grapes. I feel connected with the universe. The world of nature and human nature are my teachers, sowing and not telling me the secrets of the wild and sacred. From my porch deck I sail into a new world. Discoveries loom in the fog, opportunities inhabit this wilderness. It is a sacred place for myself and my family because I can call this farm home."