Blue Diamond Peaches

It's surprising, what can spark memory, and the path the mind takes finding it.  Anything can do it - a sound, scent, the feel of summer or winter on your skin, a kiss, a word.

This past week, it was word.  My friend, Keith, was mourning the lack of apricots, his favorite fruit,  in produce sections.  "It was a rainy season," he said.  "Might not be much of a crop."

While I sympathized with him, I couldn't mourn it the same way he did.  Apricots are small and tough, and the flavor carries a twang that doesn't quite agree with my tongue's expectations.  If it looks like a peach, my tongue expects peach.

And that, of course, took my meandering mind back fifteen years, or so, to the summer my daughter needed glasses and I needed extra cash to pay for them.  Happily and coincidentally, my dad needed someone to tend the produce stand by the peach orchard.

And so, there I sat beside 211 and the railroad tracks, waiting for people to stop and buy a bushel of Ruby Reds, a peck of Winblo's, a canteloupe or a dozen ears of corn for Sunday dinner.

The stand was actually a raised concrete platform, and to reach it, and what used to be the packshed, you had to climb steep steps.  Beside the shed was an old fashioned pump you actually had to PUMP in order to get water. There were two rooms at the end of the platform, and during lulls in business, I braved the rattlesnake nests and explored them.  It was there I discovered the grading belts, equipment that was used years ago when the orchard was a beehive of activity there beside the railroad tracks.  Workers culled the fruit, packed it in crates and shipped it all over the United States, via the Aberdeen-Rockfish rail lines under the Blue Diamond label.  I was excited when I found leftover labels and old crates - I was sitting in front of 200 acres of history, and here was tangible evidence!  I could almost see what it was like, way back then, workers hand-picking peaches, loading them onto the backs of flatbed trucks and bringing them to the shed. 

It had to be an arduous task - those trees grew in the hottest sand in North Carolina.  Breezes don't seem to stir in the fields;  I could imagine busy, sweaty bodies.  Lunch breaks, downing a cold coke or ice water.  Mopping brows with bandanas.  Splashing water from the pump on flushed faces.

But the packshed was also the site of a tragedy that halted business permanently.  One humid summer day in 1969,  on the very platform from where I sold peaches, the son of the tenant farmers, Jack, laced his wife's liquor with a lethal dose of insecticide.  Dot never made it to the hospital; she died, leaving behind two small children.  With their father in prison and their mother dead, the task of raising them fell on their grandmother, Miss Lib. Blue Diamond peaches became a thing of the past.

Dad bought the orchard in 1980, breathed new life into it.  He hired migrant workers to prune the long-neglected trees. When they bloomed, the fields looked like a sea of pink cotton candy; he thinned and cultivated, and his first crop yielded fruit the size of baseballs, sweet, juicy, beautifully blush and yellow. 

I earned the money for my daughter's eye exam and glasses that summer, and never worked there again, but it was an adventure worth having.  I met people who once worked the fields and shed. I learned the difference between freestones and clings. tasted my first Georgia Belle - a white peach with a delicate flavor.  I froze tons of peaches that year - Dad would give me the fruits that wouldn't last another day, and I preserved or made cobblers with them.  To this day, I know that Winblo's come off during the second week of July, and if I want Ruby Reds, I'd best step up my pace to the nearest orchard before June is over.

Dad's orchard is history, now.  Upon retirement, he pulled up the peach trees rather than replace the hundreds of old ones that were dying, and replanted with less labor intense long leaf pines.  The packshed burned in the summer of 2000.  The landmark is now just a pile of blackened concrete; the labels and equipment are gone, as are the peaches. 

I miss it.