The Day Sixty Neighbors Picked Grandma’s Peaches

He could not climb, so he worked the bottom branches with a five-gallon bucket and filled it faster than most of the boys on the ladders.

Every tree had somebody in it. The teenage boys went up the tallest ones, the trees Dewayne had said nobody could reach, and called down to each other from up in the leaves.

Their mothers stood below holding the ladders steady with one hand and taking baskets with the other.

A girl of about seven named Sudie came with her grandmother. She was too little for the ladders, so she sat down in the grass at Grandma’s feet.

Grandma showed her how to sort the peaches as they came in: the firm ones, the soft ones, the ones with a bird peck.

“The soft ones go to the nursing homes first,” Grandma told her. “Old people like a soft peach. Their teeth aren’t what they were.”

“Are your teeth what they were?” Sudie asked her.

“Not even close, baby,” Grandma said, and Sudie laughed until she fell over sideways in the grass.

Around nine, I carried a full bushel basket up the row and set it down by Grandma’s chair. She had a ripe peach in her hand.

She was not eating it. She was just holding it and turning it in her fingers, feeling the fuzz.

“I thought I was the only one left who remembered these trees,” she said.

I could not answer her. I just put my hand on her shoulder, and she put her hand over mine, and we stayed like that a minute while the ladders creaked all around us.

Then Grandma did the thing I will remember the rest of my life.

She lifted the galvanized bucket out from under her chair, the one with her initials and 1972 painted on the side, and held it out to Sudie.

“You’ll need this,” she said. “It’s for picking. Get your grandmother to lift you up to the low branches.”

Sudie took the bucket in both arms like it was a baby. Her grandmother looped the canvas strap over her small shoulder, and it hung nearly to her knees.

Grandma watched her walk off down the row with it, and her eyes filled up, and she let them.

“That bucket has been waiting a long time for somebody,” she said to me, very quietly.

By ten o’clock we had ninety bushels lined up at the end of the rows in the shade.

The church ladies had set up a folding table by the shed with ice water and sausage biscuits. Somebody’s boy was running a hose over the full baskets to cool them down.

That was when I heard the mower coming up the road.

Dewayne lives a mile down, and on Saturdays he drives his zero-turn up the shoulder of the road instead of loading it on the trailer.

You can hear it a long way off. Grandma heard it the same time I did. She turned her head toward the sound.