Fruit Trade Everyone Wins– Haibun

The old couple’s peach tree up on Mowbray Mountain deep down in Tennessee was so overloaded that a giant limb split off the trunk and crashed to the garden floor. That still left more than two-thirds of the tree that they had planted intact and covered with delicious freestone fruit.

A Good Fruit Trade

Our tomato plants, in Northwest Georgia, were similarly overburdened and splitting, even though they were held up by strong wire cages. So we gathered the best of the best and took them down the hill and over the river and through the woods and up the mountain to their place. They seemed pleased with the trade, as they hadn’t planted any tomatoes this year. Unusual for them.

Old friends gather at the Poe peach tree to pick ripe (and not-so-ripe) fresh fruit on a warm Mowbray Mountain July evening.

The property owner and my wife’s Daddy and we went out to the damaged tree. We took bags and baskets and harvested some from the tree and more ripe tree-fall the the grass below. Most were slightly bruised or with a slight wormhole in them. What does that matter to us? We’ll pour boiling water over them, easily peel the skins off, slice them in quarters, slice off the bruises and cut out the worms, and make them into cobbler or crisp or smoothies or salsa.

A tisket, a tasket, a brown and yellow basket full of peaches.

Summer Memory Next Winter

We’ll freeze some, and in the depth of winter, when the wind howls and the sleet beats against the kitchen window and back door, and the freezing seems to ooze through the cracks, we’ll take out a couple of baking pans and arrange those peaches in rows along the greased pan bottoms. We’ll cover those orange-yellow quarter-orbs with batter or oats and cinnamon and brown sugar and bake them at 450 degrees, and steam up the kitchen and fill our nostrils and our eyes and our mouths and our stomachs with warm memories of this blushing Summer afternoon up on Mowbray Mountain.

A Good Fruit Trade Haiku

When I have what you
have not, and you have what I
don’t, it’s a good trade.

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Posted in Nature Haibun -- Prose + Haiku, Nature's Garden: Gardening and Land Management and tagged , , , , .

David Kuhns

Dave Kuhns is originally a quasi-city boy from suburban Milwaukee, but he spent weekends and summers in nature on Lake Winneconne in central Wisconsin. After raising his kids in a Seattle suburb, he moved to a small town in central Utah. He figured he’d buy some rural property there, or back in the Badger State.

Then he fell in love. Through a series of amazing events, he bought a rural property (a few acres) across the creek from the Chickamauga National Military Park (Civil War battlefield). There, he and his new wife are putting into reality the conservation, gardening and land management practices he learned from his grandmother, his forest ranger Dad, his little brother, and his own surburban experience.