Almost every year I think
"That peach tree's gone to come no more."
I turn my back on it, I blink,
and it's borne peaches by the score.
This herky-jerky winter, mild
days coaxed it into early bloom
the night before a hard freeze. Wild
trees mostly fall to such a doom.
The Feral Peach Tree's blossoms clung
on through the freeze, and bloomed still more
when it had passed. The first fruit hung
before Memorial Day. There's more
where that fruit came from. It's a tree
not seen before, nor seen again.
An evildoer slipped out free
from those who said they'd keep him in,
sprayed poison on the Feral Peach.
The branches that the spray could touch
look dead now. Dormant, all and each.
Men have been hanged for half as much.
"The peach tree's dead," a visitor said.
Don't count on it. I think, like me,
that tree has vowed to keep its bed
and watch until the night we see
the evildoer on the ground,
by his own poison felled at last,
condemned to lie as he is found
till ninety days and nine have passed.
The tree will drop a rotten peach
to draw ants to where he did fall
and he will lie there and beseech
that someone come out, help to call,
and as he's made air so unpleasant
those who believe we should forgive
this vain, presumptuous, cringing peasant
stay in the houses where they live,
and I will call the notary,
the lawyer, and policemen, too,
to see our common enemy--
he can't repent, but how he'll rue!
And he'll learn, as his victims learned,
that doctors are no use at all
when glyphosate is what has burned
the skin that's doomed to rot and fall.
And I don't doubt the peach tree, too,
in its own way, will laugh to see,
unfailingly, the poison do
more harm to him than it or me.
Optional cut-off point for tired eyes.
The Famous Feral Elberta Peach Tree currently has three high branches, each loaded with more peaches than they look as if they could bear. Once again it's hurt, but I don't think it's dead. It has more life in it than all the other peach trees in the orchard had, together.
That stubborn sell-out everybody loves to hate, you know, the old man who looks a bit like our late founding member Oogesti but has lately started looking "older" than Oogesti ever did, has put some obstacles in what looked like the clear path of Glyphosate Awareness. This week a local case involving pesticide vapor drift was judged in favor of the poisoner.
So? I said to the Bad News Bear who drove up to bear this bad news. Is it not said that, when the pretty girls line up on one side of an issue, that side is about to win? All the young, pretty female Congressmen voted the right way on the Farm Bill. Spraying poison should be recognized as a violent crime against persons in another year or two. Meanwhile, even that judge who's about to retire reportedly said "Spraying on someone else's property is a different matter." I don't think my neighborhood is going to have a Bad Neighbor for very many more days.
About the old man in Washington, I don't know. I hope he does have a soul that is capable of real repentance. I think people should be praying that he has.
As for the peach tree...you probably have to be local to appreciate this. Peach trees do not usually live long, this high up the Blue Ridge. The long hard freeze killed most. The sudden late freeze killed most that had survived that. The poison spraying? Hah. It's bearing fruit.
Some trees are super-fertile the year before they die, but this one's been super-fertile for ten years in a row already. I think it thinks it's an apple or persimmon tree, something that's supposed to be strong and hardy. It did not get the memo that peach trees are supposed to die if you look at them the wrong way.
I doubt that anybody will get the full, rich flavor of an Elberta peach off the famous tree this year. It wouldn't be fit to eat, this year, anyway. Next year I won't be surprised if that tree is bowed down to the ground with sweet, ripe peaches, as so many times before. It does not rest for years in between crops, as other peach trees do.
Somewhere, one of the pits of one of its fruits will sprout into another tree like it. One, but probably not two.
