The Day Sixty Neighbors Picked Grandma’s Peaches

So I drove home and thought about it. My husband, Jarvis, was in the shop behind the house putting a new belt on the tiller.

He works for the electric co-op, climbing poles and running bucket trucks.

I told him what Dewayne had said. Jarvis wiped his hands on a red rag and did not answer for a minute. He likes Dewayne. They hunt together every November.

“Man’s worn down to the nub,” Jarvis said. “But that’s still no way to talk to your mama.”

“I want to get her peaches in,” I said. “All of them.”

“Forty trees?” He whistled. “That’s a lot of peaches, Lorna. You’d need a crowd.”

“Then I’ll get a crowd.”

On Monday at lunch, after the last child had gone through the line and the kitchen was wiped down, I sat on an overturned milk crate by the back door and wrote one post for our church’s page.

I kept it plain. I did not name Dewayne. I did not say anybody had done anything wrong. I wrote it the way Grandma would have wanted it written.

“My grandmother, Velda Crabtree, is 89 and in a wheelchair. She has kept 40 peach trees going since 1972, and this year they are loaded, but she can no longer pick them. This Saturday at 7 in the morning, we are going to try to get them in. Bring a ladder if you have one. Every peach will go to the nursing homes in our county.”

I read it over three times. Then I pushed the button and went back inside to start the bleach water for the trays.

When I looked at my phone again at two o’clock, it had been shared forty times. Our pastor had put it on his own page with one line: “Some of you remember buying peaches from her card table. Let’s go.”

By supper there were more than a hundred comments. People from three different churches. People who did not go to any church at all. People I had not seen since high school.

“I bought peaches from Miss Velda every summer as a boy. I’ll be there with two ladders.”

“She taught my Sunday school class in 1981. Count me and my girls in.”

“I’m 78 and can’t climb, but I can hold a bucket.”

I sat at the kitchen table and read every one of them out loud to Jarvis, and somewhere around the fiftieth I had to stop and get up and go stand at the sink for a while.

On Tuesday a man named Willard called me at the cafeteria. He runs the packing shed four miles down the highway, the one with the big tin roof where the tourists stop.

“I saw your post,” he said. “You’re going to need baskets. I can loan you two hundred half-bushels and a hundred full bushels. Bring them back when you’re done. No charge.”

“Willard, I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Your grandma sold to my daddy for years,” he said. “He always said hers were the sweetest on the road. That’s thanks enough.”