Thanks to my grandfather for the orchard he grew for us

All it took to make me nostalgic this week was a box of ripe peaches.

I grew up less than a quarter mile from a veritable garden of Eden, although I didn’t properly appreciate it until after I grew up.

My grandfather — “Pa” — was the orchardist. He worked most of his magic long before I was born, although he still deftly wielded a hoe into his 96th year.

By the time I was old enough to toddle in the shade of his orchard, his life was drawing to a close, and I never got to really know him or learn his secrets.

He left behind a tidy kingdom of peach and pear trees, a hedge of rhubarb (which I’ve tried and failed multiple times to recreate), and a thicket of sandhill plums.

The nearby plowed land regularly yielded more tomatoes, squash, black-eyed peas, pinto beans, chiles, and okra than we could begin to consume.

Time and dry years and grasshopper infestations and tree borers — to name a few of the challenges of gardening on the High Plains — took their toll.

Gradually, tree by tree, our paradise faded away.

Pa was either much better at what he did than I am, or he was more dedicated to the cause.

Or possibly both.

I’ve put out plenty of replacement trees over the years in his original location and in new spots around my yard and closer to the house.

Imagine, I unrealistically thought, the joy of walking out in pajamas to pluck a ripe peach from a tree for breakfast.

Alas, my last two little peach trees officially perished last year. I hope Pa doesn’t know this, but I can still easily count the number of peaches they produced using only the fingers on my two hands (with a few to spare).

That is why I am wishing today for a chance to return some way to Pa’s orchard on a fine late summer afternoon.

I’d like to climb on his wobbly rusty ladder and find a perfect peach — with luck, a fragrant and blushing beauty hidden away so well that the mockingbird hasn’t discovered and tasted it yet.

I’d smell it first because nothing smells better than a ripe peach — nothing, I tell you.

I’d eat it right there, warm from the tree, with juice dripping from my fingers and running down my chin. I could rinse off after with cold water from the green hose attached to the garden pump.

Then I’d look up to the sky and whisper a thank you to Pa for the orchard he grew for us. And I’d ask him if he could please — please — find a way to share his secrets so I could make it happen all over again.

Betty Williamson is feeling downright peachy. Reach her at:

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