The Fruits of Paradise

Having grown up with three Elbertas in the back yard, I know what a real peach is--a heavenly fruit so soft it bruises to the touch, so juicy that that you have to wear a bib to eat it.

Take it from me, an encounter with a peach should be an experience bordering on religious ecstasy. You don't eat it as much as you sink your mouth into its succulent flesh, let the golden pulp gush all over your face, the amber juice dribble down your chin, and the taste fill your soul.

So what then, you say, are those cold, stone-hard things sold by the supermarkets? Granted, they look like peaches and sometimes they even smell like peaches (a parfum Paris should be so fortunate as to duplicate) , but they taste like cuttle-bone. They are unripe fruit, picked before their time, and putting them on the window sill until they rot doesn't do the trick. If Husband and I didn't live within an afternoon's drive of peach-growing country, our offspring would never have known what a real peach tastes like.

I grant that a peach's prime is about the same as a Mayfly's, but surely we can work this out better. Please--let's allow the little fellers to get a touch of color in their cheeks of tan before we load them in the big trucks with the logos on their sides.