The Peach Walk

MADDY PASS JOHN BURROUGHS SCHOOL

Mimi brought me hard Flamm’s Orchard peaches last Sunday morning. Free stone, fuzzy, and sunset colored. I can tell immediately that she snuck some of her own peaches into my overflowing half-peck, and I love her for it.

Each dusk since then I slowly circle my house’s outdoor perimeter, steeping in the humidity, savoring my own humanity, savoring a peach apple-style. The bees are lazy by this time and the air is fragrant near the mock-orange bush.

Juice runs down my body without protest. There’s so much liquid it’s ludicrous to eat inside on clean floors. Last week our water was off and without showers my legs stayed sticky.

Sometimes on my way I’ll catch my dad waving from the second story of the white building next to my house. He opens his window and we talk politics and baseball. I haven’t hugged him since last month when he left home to protect me from the virus.

It rains some nights here, and at dusk mosquitoes bite my legs, but my Peach Walk is something that’s mine. It’s what I have left.