Year of the Peach

This is an excerpt from the weekly News-Loveletter. If you would like it sent to your inbox directly (with all the other juicy bits, including a mini joy practice), you can add yourself to my mailing list here.

We ate at least 10 pounds of peaches from our freezer last year. We ate all fourteen pints of the peaches we’d canned as well. So we planted peaches—three trees, to be exact.

I’d like to tell you we harvested a bushel in our first year, but that’s not how it works. Peach trees take time to grow. Roots are sent down, then the tree stretches up and bears fruit.

I watch this happening in myself and others, too. Sometimes it seems like forever before the fruits of our efforts ripen fully. We decide to live a different way, to learn new skills, to treat ourselves better, and it takes time for new habits to form and old ones to fall away. The fruits of our efforts arrive when neural pathways are forged and trust is built. We keep watering and weeding our new way of being. Thank goodness, our results come faster than peaches!

Seda and I have a plan B on the peach front. We have a relationship with a local farm, and oh my! The Red Haven variety especially sent us over the edge this year. Our freezer is full, and we’ve canned more than we did last year, too. I couldn’t be happier. We are smoothie and sweet-treat ready!

Now that I think of it, our relationship with that farm is over twenty years old. We’ve watched each other’s kids grow up. They call me directly when there are boxes of split pits that need to move. We all benefit. I guess relationships are like trees, too.

Which trees are you excited to plant—literally and figuratively— this year? What kinds of fruit will be yours one day?