summertime.... or, the world in a peach

Breakfast: the best peach I ever ate, sliced with cottage cheese.

It's an organic "Elegant Lady" peach from our CSA box.

CSA of course stands for "community supported agriculture:" we pay up front for biweekly boxes of fruit, all summer long, and let me tell you, it's heaven.

As I savor the peach, I consider how the sense of connection to the farmer and to nature makes it even more pleasurable to eat. This peach has never seen the inside of a supermarket or even Brennan's...it came straight from the farmer, David Masumoto (left), to the fruit box guys in Minnesota (I can't remember their names but I've been reading their newsletters for three years), to me.

I know the names of the farmer's kids (Nikiko and Korio, above right—such elfin creatures!), I can visit his website, and in the newsletter I can even read his story:

My old peach orchard tells my family's stories. In the twisted trunks lay the history of my father who planted these trees more than thirty years ago. I recall helping him as the family lined up trees by sight, holding up a bare root tree, closing one eye and squinting the other...down a quarter mile row trying to keep the row straight. We weren't perfect nor fast, and for decades I've had to swing my tractor wide to avoid the crooked tree I must have planted. But planting five hundred trees by hand and trusting our vision seems to be a wonderfully human way to befin an orchard. We made mistakes and rationalized our efforts. Life in nture is not always straight.

Maybe if more people understood that they wouldn't have such a problem with queers. In the film "The Business of Fancydancing," the narrator (clearly semi-autobiographical representation of the author, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian) talks about telling his traditional grandmother he was gay. Paraphrased:

She tells him a story about how she once got a rooster that was gay. He was more beautiful than any rooster she'd ever seen, so she should have known, she reflects. Anyway, he wouldn't service the hens, just walked around looking beautiful. Finally she got another rooster so the damn hens would lay eggs, and whaddya know, the first rooster walks up to the new rooster and squats down in front of him to mate. "So then I knew he was gay, and I ate him," she concluded.

Although this is not exactly a happy ending (to me anyway), the narrator explains that this was her way of saying that she doesn't think there's anything unnatural about being gay. I wonder if, for someone who sees how the "same" corn plant or peach tree can come up in an infinite variety of shapes, it doesn't seem so odd to think that people come in all different varieties as well.

How did I get here from the peach? Ah yes. I was initially going to talk about Thich Nhat Hanh's description of "interbeing," that nothing is possible without everything else. He uses the example of the paper on which the reader is seeing his ideas. Without the tree and the logger and the processing plant and its workers, the paper would not exist; without the sun and the rain and the sky and the earth, the tree would not exist. It's all interconnected; every piece is necessary; everything needs everything else. Interbeing.

So. The world, but especially David Masumoto and his parents planting the orchard and children picking the peaches, and his tractor swinging round the crooked tree, and the earth of his farm and the California sun, and his grandmother too (whom he describes perfectly enjoying a summer peach—you can read the whole essay here, in his moving paean to food and farming and memory).... it all connects to me through one peach this morning, and I love it, and I love the summer.

I haven't been to town in days, well, two days. I love being out here, especially with Loopy, even though she's peeved at me at the moment, I still love just being near her all day, day after day, in the quiet house surrounded by all this beauty.

our backyard
(for real—note the composters at the bottom center of the frame)

I wish I could stay here forever.