Peaches
I was thinking several weeks ago that this would be my summer of peaches. I spent the last two summers
abroad and didn’t seize whatever opportunities presented themselves there to eat the fruit that becomes available in summer, and in New York such things tend to fall beyond my budget. But peaches are widely available at fruit stands in Damascus, and at something like $1.75 per kilo, within my means. Rather than eat the salty and limp food sold at the University of Damascus cafeteria, I sometimes bought three peaches and a quarter kilo of plums at a fruit stand in the morning and ate one or two during every class break, a sweet and dripping lunch that spilled its juice all over my fingers, chin, and desk. I bought other goods from the fruit sellers, especially when the man working at the 24-hour stand in ‘Afif plied me with his salesmanship, peppering me with a constant stream of questions about which tourists sights I had and hadn’t visited in Syria while punctuating my replies with questions about the rest of the fruit he was proffering: “Oh, you haven’t visited Palmyra yet? And wouldn’t you like some figs? What about some grapes? Or some melon?” His mere questions were persuasive, appealing to a burgeoning seed of greed nestled somewhere between my eyes and my stomach for the firm flesh and rich hues of his wares. I bought these other fruits, but the peaches were the crown of what I bought. They were almost always ripe when I purchased them, especially as the summer progressed—sometimes to the point of bursting in the bag—and covered in a thicket of fuzz that I massaged off under cold water, before biting into what never failed to be a tangy and sweet respite from the dead heat of the day or the unrelenting pressure of class.
I discovered that peaches in America are different; the respite they provide is less intense, and not just because my days in Portland are less tiring. It was only when I picked up a certain piece of fruit today that I discovered it to be a peach and not a nectarine, so thin was the fuzz covering its skin—more like the hair on an infant’s cheeks than the light swirls on the crown of its head, as on the peaches in Syria. And more disappointingly still, when I bit into even the ripest pieces of fruit I found them comparatively bland, tending toward a fainter sour or sweet without the dazzling combination of both found in Syrian peaches. I told my observations to my mother, and she remembered having to rub the fuzz off of the peaches of her childhood, growing up on a farm in New York. Being back in America is dazzling for the availability of some of my favorite foods that are harder to obtain in Syria: pesto and olive tapenade, Marcona almonds and good brie, sushi and plum wine; but these strangely evolved American peaches, whether the result of hot-housing farming or genetic engineering or both, are not among them. I’m not sure where these peaches that I eat in Oregon come from; they might have been grown here, or been shipped halfway around the world, for all I know. But given that most of the food sold at Syrian fruit stands is what’s in season, it seems that it’s grown locally, and while it at first seems unfortunate not to be able to access all the foods I like all year round, the quality of what’s offered is compensation enough. It’s a different way of eating, but one I can get used to.
