Finally! I’ve been looking for good peaches all summer, and a few days ago the produce guy at Miss Cordelia’s—the small boutique grocery a few blocks from our house here in Harbor Town—told me that peaches aren’t usually any good before August. How did I go 67 years without knowing that? And is that a new thing, or has it always been true? My fuzzy childhood memories include eating peaches all summer long, or so I thought. A favorite memory is making homemade ice cream with my grandmother in Meridian, Mississippi, in the 1950s, and putting fresh peaches into the creamy frozen custard just before it reached its perfect soft-serve state.
I’ve already been back to get more of these perfectly sweet, non-pithy peaches. My husband has been eating them on cereal. I had one with cinnamon toast this morning. As I was savoring its perfect texture and taste, I thought of an essay I wrote that was published in The Shoe Burnin’: Stories of Southern Soul in 2013. It was a three-day “journal” of a binge. Really a reflection of my disordered eating and drinking habits. (Note: I still have disordered eating habits, although I’ve made some progress in that area recently. And, in case you’re new to my blog, I quit drinking on September 8, 2017.)
Anyway, here’s the paragraph about the peaches, from “Eat, Drink, Repeat: One Woman’s Three-Day Search for Everything.” (You can read the entire essay here.)
I look around the kitchen and find fresh peaches ripening in a small brown bag on the counter. I pull one out and make a small indention in its flesh with my thumb—it feels ripe. I bring the fuzzy yellow-red orb to my nose (I always smell my food before tasting it) and breathe in its sweet aroma. It’s ready. Using a small, white-handled Cutco paring knife, I make one incision, then another, allowing a perfect slice to be removed from the peach. I observe its texture—free of pithiness—and its color: red tendrils, freshly pulled from the seed, contrast with the shiny yellow crescent. I put the entire slice into my mouth and savor it slowly. I give it an 8. If it were a 10, I would eat the rest of the peach naked. Instead, I pour a small amount of white sugar onto a saucer and dip the remaining slices, one at a time, into the sugar before eating them. No longer savoring the flavor, I eat mindlessly, reaching into the bag for another peach, dipping one slice after another into the sugar, waiting for a surge of energy and wondering if it will sustain me for an afternoon of writing and working out and preparing dinner.