Epitaph For A Peach: Four Seasons On My Family Farm

epitaph for a peach four seasons on my family farm DAVID MAS MASUMOTO For Mom and Dad and Marcy, Nikiko, and Korio Contents Prologue Epitaph for a Peach v spring bloom Chapter One Spring Work 5 Chapter Two Workers of the Land 17 Chapter Three As If the Farmer Died 28 Chapter Four New Farm, Old Pests 39 Chapter Five Learning to Fail 55 summer harvest Chapter Six Summer Work 69 Chapter Seven A Family Farm 83 Chapter Eight Wild Walks 103 Chapter Nine Harvests 116 Chapter Ten September Is Not to Be Trusted 131 Autumn Chill Chapter Eleven The Year Begins 157 Chapter Twelve Autumn Work 169 Chapter Thirteen Orphaned 182 Winter Hope Chapter Fourteen Farming with Ghosts 195 Chapter Fifteen Winter Work 211 Chapter Sixteen Return of the Egret 225 Acknowledgments 235 About the Author Cover Copyright About the Publisher prologue epitaph for a peach The last of my Sun Crest peaches will be dug up. A bulldozer will be summoned to crawl into my fields, rip each tree from the earth, and toss it aside. The sounds of cracking limbs and splitting trunks will echo throughout the countryside. My orchard will topple easily, gobbled up by the power of the diesel engine and the fact that no one seems to want a peach variety with a wonderful taste. Yes, wonderful. Sun Crest tastes like a peach is supposed to. As with many of the older varieties, the flesh is so juicy that it oozes down your chin. The nectar explodes in your mouth and the fragrance enchants your nose, a natural perfume that can never be captured. vi / Epitaph for a Peach Sun Crest is one of the last remaining truly juicy peaches. When you wash that treasure under a stream of cooling water, your fingertips instinctively search for the gushy side of the fruit. Your mouth waters in anticipation. You lean over the sink to make sure you don’t drip on yourself. Then you sink your teeth into the flesh, and the juice trickles down your cheeks and dangles on your chin. This is a real bite, a primal act, a magical sensory celebration announcing that summer has arrived. The experience of eating a Sun Crest peach automatically triggers a smile and a rush of summer memories. Eating a Sun Crest reminds us of the simple savory pleasures of life. My dad planted our Sun Crest orchard twenty years ago, and those trees paid my college tuition. But now they are old and obsolete. Stricter and stricter quality standards coupled with declining demand cut deeply into production levels. Our original fifteen acres and 1,500 trees have been reduced to a patch of 350. I’m told these peaches have a problem. When ripe, they turn an amber gold rather than the lipstick red that seduces the public. Every year the fruit brokers advise me to get rid of those old Sun Crests. “Better peaches have come along,” they assure me. “Peaches that are fuller in color and can last for weeks in storage.” I have a recurring nightmare of cold-storage rooms lined with peaches that stay rock hard, the new science of fruit cryonics keeping peaches in suspended animation. There is no room there for my Sun Crests, all of them rejected with the phrase NO SHELF LIFE stamped in red across each box. “Consumers love the new varieties,” brokers advise. “They’ll abandon your old Sun Crests.” My sales re