Fruit Enough to Spare
I worried all week that I would miss the chance to share a gift. But it turns out I have a lot to learn about peaches.
The pond is still delicate this week. Not clear, not settled, the water carrying more than it should. That is simply where we are right now, and I mention it because the Berry instinct in me always wants to start at the ground under my own feet before I go looking for a lesson somewhere else.
But the lesson this week is not at the pond. It is 100 feet from it, in a peach tree so loaded with fruit that the branches bow to the grass.
I did not expect this. Apple trees stand a few yards away, same soil, same pruning and feeding, and they have given us nothing this year. A late freeze caught their blossoms at exactly the wrong hour, and there was no arguing with it. The apples did nothing wrong. Neither did I. The freeze simply arrived when it arrived, and one tree kept its fruit and the other one did not, for reasons neither tree earned.
The peach tree takes the light. It makes sugar, makes fruit, and keeps doing that until the branches cannot bear any more.
That was the worry. The trip north didn't help, leaving me more tired than expected and more distracted than I like to admit. Somewhere in that exhaustion, I was half certain I'd come home to a closed window, the ripening finished without me. Peaches littering the ground.
But, they waited. I came home to fruit enough to spare, and there still is. Basket after basket, more than we can eat, more than we can give away fast enough.
Sunlight becomes peaches. I have known that fact since childhood biology and never once felt it as astonishing until this week, holding a bitten peach with juice running down my hand and asking what I did to deserve this. The tending was real. I planted it. I water it. I prune it every winter I've owned it. But the tending and the gift are not the same size. They were never going to be.
This is what reception looks like when it finally stops being a word in a sermon and becomes a peach in your hand. You did not make the light. You did not make the chemistry that turns it sweet. You showed up with water and a pruning saw, and you were handed abundance that outscales the labor by every measure that matters.
Yesterday, we buried my friend Jack. He gave forty years to loving particular pieces of ground, and that ground will receive him back. If anything, I think that's part of why the peaches taste like this at all this week. The same soil that grows what I get to keep is the soil that will receive what I cannot keep. Adam, earth-creature, drawn from adamah: dust becoming fruit and dust becoming rest are the same mercy, spoken twice.
The apple trees will bear again next year, or they won't, and that will not be a verdict on anything either. That is simply what it means to live inside a gift economy instead of a ledger. Some years the fruit comes. Some years it doesn't. The giving was never contingent on our getting it right.
This week, whatever has been given to you and whatever has been taken from you, let both be as real as they are. Taste what is sweet. Grieve what is gone. Let neither explain the other away.
A Prayer
God of the light that turns itself into sweetness without asking our permission or waiting on our presence: thank you for the gift that ripened while I was away and did not diminish for my absence. Teach me to hold what I tend with open hands, knowing the harvest was never mine to guarantee. Where the apple trees stand bare this year, keep me from reading blame into what was only weather. As I stand at another grave this week, hold together in me what I cannot hold apart on my own: the abundance and the loss, the fruit and the falling. Through Christ, who took bread that was already grain, already sun, already gift, and gave thanks before he gave it away, and who was laid in the ground before he rose from it. Amen.
