OPINION: Peach Blossom Lit
Tom Poland
By Tom Poland
Come March, my thoughts turn to peach blossoms and memories of family fruit trees. One tree from youth stands above others. From my deep well of memories my mother’s lonely peach tree rises. Lean, green, with tiny peaches. Somewhere down the line that tree died. Died of loneliness. Bereft of an orchard to comfort it. To tell it how to grow, how not to die. I have no memories of it blooming, though it did.
All this peach business comes to me because it’s March when peach trees flower. A peach orchard in full bloom makes people do crazy things. One warm morning in peach country a lawman spotted jeans, blouses, and lingerie strewn across a peach tree. Laughter rang out. Through petals he saw two would-be models slender as blades of grass taking selfies. They were high on beauty, the trees and their own.
“You ladies need to dress and leave.”
“Sir, give us five minutes. We’re taking photos for our portfolio.”
“Keep your eyes peeled. Rats will come to eat peaches and rattlers know that.”
The girls blew by, dressed, and left.
Blossoms so magical women disrobe for them.
Blossoms so magical writers must write about them.
My friend, Dennis McCarthy, saw my photo of peach blossoms and sent me a passage from Shelby Foote’s Shiloh. —“The peach blossoms were falling. They fell not as blossoms fall in a light wind, but as if shaken loose by the violence of the firing … drifting down, thick as snow, through the smoky air. The air was filled with smoke and dust and sound … and through it all the peach blossoms kept falling, shaken from the trees by the concussion of the guns, drifting down continuously, as though it were snowing .… The ground beneath the trees was covered with them, and still they fell, white and soft, in contrast to the harsh crash of musketry and the screams of the wounded.”
Curiosity got the best of me and I looked up other peach blossom passages. I’ll spare you would-be writers’ lofty analyses.
Mississippi’s William Faulkner: “The air was like spring, and the trees were in bloom … the faint sweetness of blossoms came and went .…”
Georgia’s Carson McCullers: “The air smelled faintly of blossoms and warm dust, and the trees were pale with flowers .…”
Another Mississippian, Eudora Welty: “The peach trees had burst into bloom overnight, pink and white against the yard .…”
Another Georgian, Alice Walker: “In the spring the trees would flower—peach and plum—and the yard would be alive with color …”
Anonymous: “Right after he died, she dreamed she found herself in a cold orchard of pink candles afire. She walked through drifts of petals, as if pink butterflies had fallen during the night. That’s how she felt, a frozen butterfly fallen to earth.”
Another fond memory … the large plum tree that grew alongside my parent’s driveway. Each spring it burst into white blooms and soon its branches sagged with juicy about-to-pop plums some nearly ping-pong ball size. The colors changes as they ripened, then spoiled. Green, yellow, orange, red, then purple. The plums fell, a riot of color that made the weeds and Johnson grass jealous. The sweetest lay on the ground. I ate them, dust and all.
Folks generally don’t plant fruit trees anymore. Just buy waxed fruit arranged in pretty rows by strangers. I miss the old folks’ crab apples, peaches, apples, and pears. I miss that plum bush. I miss their blossoms. Maybe that’s why the peach orchards have a hold on me … why each March I make a pilgrimage into the land of pink. Trying to recapture boyhood … trying not to fall, not to rot, but to bud and be green one more time.