The Day Sixty Neighbors Picked Grandma’s Peaches

“Let the deer have them, Mama.” My uncle Dewayne said it standing on Grandma’s porch steps on a Saturday morning in late July, with his mower idling in the yard behind him.

Grandma Velda was sitting in her wheelchair by the screen door with a glass of sweet tea sweating on the little table beside her.

She had asked him a simple thing. She had asked if he would help her get the peaches in.

“They’re not worth picking anymore,” Dewayne said. He took his cap off and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. “Half of them are too tall to reach. I’m not wasting a week out there.”

I was on the porch swing with a bag of tomatoes I had brought her from my garden. I watched Grandma’s face.

She did not argue. She did not cry. She just nodded and looked down at her hands in her lap.

“All right, son,” she said. “I only asked.”

Dewayne put his cap back on, went down the steps, climbed on his mower and went back to the front yard.

The sound of that engine filled up the whole morning, and nobody on the porch said another word for a long time.

My grandmother was 89 that summer. She weighed maybe a hundred pounds in her church shoes.

Her hair had gone white so long ago I could not remember it any other color, and she still combed it into soft waves every morning by feel.

She planted her first peach trees in the spring of 1972.

There were forty of them, Elbertas mostly, set in four rows of ten on the slope behind her house in the South Carolina Upcountry, where the red clay grows peaches the way other places grow weeds.

Granddaddy had hurt his back at the mill that winter, and money was thin. Grandma decided she would sell peaches from a card table by the road.

She dug every one of those holes herself, with a mattock and a shovel and her youngest on her hip.

Peach trees do not live forever. Most of them give you fifteen or twenty good years and then they go.

So every time one of Grandma’s trees died, she pulled it and planted another in the same spot. She kept it at forty for fifty-four years.

People think that is a small thing. It is not.

It meant she was out there every February with the pruning saw, every spring watching the frost reports, every summer with her ladder and her bucket, for more than half a century.

The year she turned 86, she fell off that ladder. She broke her hip, and after the surgery her legs never came all the way back.

She has been in the wheelchair since. The trees kept coming in anyway.

The first summer after the fall, my cousins and I picked a little. The second summer, fewer of us came.

Last summer, most of the crop dropped on the ground and the deer came out of the pines every evening to eat it.