Hold Tight and Pretend It's a Plan

These men never met each other -- Heinz and Tony -- but they lived and farmed on the same piece of ground in Newburg, had the same next door neighbors, each had a hard-working and complicit wife, they all raised barefoot farm children and those men had the same dream of making sorghum molasses. They are separated by time but linked in so many ways. It seems to me that sorghum epitomizes what they have in common -- that and child labor. And yet, these two men could not possibly be more different from each other. Our dad Tony learned about farming by traveling around and visiting other farms, mostly in the South but all across the country. Our winter trips always had a farm visiting component -- we would be driving through Louisiana on the way to California and Hawaii and the four of us kids would be lounging around in the back of the bus and we would groan with anticipated boredom when we turned into a driveway of some farm with equipment strewn all around a ramshackle barn.  Oh, ...

I am often drawn to write about people who have died, as I try to capture what it was about that that we all need to remember. I think that I would like to write eulogies except that I don't really want to do any research or any actual work, and that's what a real eulogy requires. That's what the clergy is trained and equipped to do so well. For those who don't pay super close attention but who read this blog from time to time, you may not notice that I try hard not to use whole names (unless the person has died and then their name is fair game). I don't want to drag someone else into the internet through my blog without express permission.  Of course, if anyone wanted to put all the pieces together it would be simple, but I don't want it to be incredibly easy from a google perspective. With that preamble, I am going to write about our friend Jean who is currently in the active process of dying. She is not dead yet and she is a loyal reader of mine, so this ...

I don't eat tomatoes unless we grew them, generally, and so my season of eating fresh tomatoes is brief and glorious. And the peaches that I am excited about eating no long exist, so I don't really eat peaches. The peaches that I am remembering and honoring by abstaining were grown next door at the Moutoux Orchard. A Moutoux peach was picked ripe, firm but soft, and so juicy that the juice ran down your face or arm and dripped off your elbow. They were the size of a small grapefruit, with a red skin, and each peach was a sacred object.  The picker wore a harness with hooks on it to hold the wooden crate on the front of his chest and he placed each peach with care. The only other time the peach was handled was to get it out of the box and into a 2.5 quart container for display purposes.  No one pinched or squeezed the fruit. John T. Moutoux, left, with Marvin Poole in 1969.  It was not a coincidence that we lived next door to the best peaches in the world. In 194...