The Day Sixty Neighbors Picked Grandma’s Peaches

I brought it to her and set it in her lap. She ran her thumb over the letters.

She did not say anything, and I did not either. We just sat there while the cicadas went in the pines.

“I’d like that bucket to get used Saturday,” she finally said. “By somebody who’ll climb.”

Saturday came up hot and sunny before seven, the kind of July morning in the Upcountry where the air already feels like a wet towel and the sky is white-blue at the edges.

I got there at six. Jarvis came with me and brought our two orchard ladders, a tall A-frame that stands on its own in soft ground and a long pole ladder that leans into the branches.

He set them in the first row and then he went to back the trailer of Willard’s baskets in by the shed.

Grandma was already dressed. She had on her yellow cotton dress, the one she wears to homecoming, and she had combed her white hair neat.

I pushed her down between the rows to the big tree at the end of the second row, the oldest one, and set her brake in the shade.

“Well,” she said, looking up the empty rows. “We’ll see.”

At ten till seven, the first car turned in off the road. It was an old couple from the Methodist church with a stepladder tied on the roof.

Right behind them came a pickup with three teenage boys in the bed and two ladders.

By seven-fifteen there were twenty cars along the fence line.

By eight o’clock I stopped counting cars and started counting people, and I made it to sixty, and then a few more came that I missed.

There were old men in seed caps and work boots. There were young mothers with babies in carriers on their backs.

There were teenagers who had never picked a peach in their lives and a woman in her eighties who had picked for the packing sheds every summer of her girlhood.

Jarvis stood at the end of the first row and showed folks how to do it, because there is a way.

You cup the peach in your whole palm, not your fingertips, and you lift and turn it, gently. If it does not come off with a little twist, it is not ready, so leave it.

“Don’t pull,” he kept saying. “Don’t squeeze. Your fingers will bruise them by tomorrow. Palm it and twist it, like a doorknob.”

An old man named Delmar came straight to Grandma’s chair before he did anything else. He is 81. He took his cap off and held it against his chest.

“Miss Velda,” he said. “I picked for you in the summer of 1974. You paid me a dollar a bushel and all the peaches I could eat.”

“I remember,” Grandma said. “You ate more than you picked.”

He laughed so hard he had to sit down on an upturned basket. Then he got back up and went to work.