Windfall

On Easter, after tea with Robyn and before heading to Melissa’s house for dinner, I ventured into the garden for the very first time since moving into the house. I’ve been rather busy inside, and the weather hasn’t been fantastic, but on Sunday the unpacking slowed and the sun shone. I went down to see my new backyard. There had been a strong southerly the night before, and the peaches were thick on the ground (and thin on the tree). Naomi and I took a big bucket outside to see what we’d find.

The garden is a tempting, overgrown jungle. A small lawn surrounded by steep terraces with flowers and fruit trees, it is the secret garden from the Frances Hodgson Burnett books, a mysterious, once-tended thicket of weeds and flowers intertwined. My memories of the first time in the house were strongest in the front room which is now my bedroom, and in the garden. Back then—more than a year ago now—I had assumed I was too sensible to take on a project of this magnitude, and it was the garden and the bedroom which gave me the strongest pangs of regret about the loss of the house. But now, having not lost it after all, it is these places which make my heart sing the loudest. These are magical—and I use that word in the most literal way I possibly can. Both of those spaces are otherworldly and somehow improbable; if I were to see the lost ship of Atlantis surface in the sea beyond my window, or hear fairies singing in the garden, I would be only mildly surprised. I have never known space to be so wholly creative. Rob, living in the space affectionately called “the bomb shelter,” isn’t sleeping. When he walks out to his room to go to bed, he wakes up. The whole garden hums with a kind of deeply creative energy which so far has been impossible for him to tamp down. And besides, he kind of likes it.

The magic has been only increased by the presence of the peach tree. We had known about the apple tree, had eaten one of the apples the day we decided to buy the house in the first place—in a symbolic final gesture (like Persephone, knowing that we wouldn’t be able to back out from the house sale once we’d eaten from its garden). The peaches have been a surprise this spring, though, coming as indistinguishable little berries on the tree before growing the shape and fuzz of a peach. We have found that they’re furrier and more fragrant than any peach we’ve ever had before, and we have learnt that Perry loves them, eating them happily outside and then proudly depositing the pit on the kitchen floor. I have long wanted a real lemon tree—with real lemons—but never even imagined a peach tree of my own (odd for someone who bought her first house in the “peach state”).

It turns out, though, that there is something especially magical about a peach, about the soft furry skin of it, the sweet but not cloying scent, the shy blush. Naomi and I peered under thick clumps of weedy grass, beneath the browning blooms of hydrangea bushes, on the paths and terraces around the tree. We admired the unblemished windfalls and we occasionally squealed in disgust as our fingers sunk into the hidden buggy or rotten underside of a seemingly-lovely peach. We came away with a large bucket full of not-quite ripe peaches, which sit in our laundry room waiting for the ripening when they can be made into fresh jam. Once they’re jammed, I’ll be able to taste the magic from my garden long into the cold and dark August winter. Some magic lives around you, and some you have to make yourself. Jam from my own peach tree contains both forms in one sweet mouthful.

(pictures from today are the kids on Easter morning (that's a good story too) and the kids rowing their log boat on Easter afternoon)