Peaches from the switch tree

Viewpoints

August 27, 2010

By Ike Adams Columnist The Richmond Register Fri Aug 27, 2010, 10:00 AM EDT

RICHMOND — I coined my first poem before I was even old enough to write it down, but my Mom remembered it well. It went:

“Mommy, Mommy come and see,

There’s peaches growing on your switch tree.”

And indeed there were peaches hanging, literally in wads, on every limb of the little tree that grew there beside the fence off our back porch in the head of Blair Branch. It had sprouted from seed, which usually means that it should not bear fruit and even if it did, the fruit should not be very tasty.

Nor was it close to another peach tree, a situation that greatly diminished its chances for pollination. Apparently though, Uncle Willie’s honeybees were far ranging and they hauled in pollen from other peach trees on their circuit. Two or three years might go by without any evidence of fruit and then would come a season when the switch tree would be loaded. In total defiance of conventional wisdom, they were absolutely delicious.

Mom’s switch tree was so named because it also produced an abundance of thin, limber sprouts about 30 or so inches long around its lower trunk. Snapped off and stripped of leaves, these sprouts were Mom’s implement of choice when it came time to administer corporal punishment to my brothers and yours truly. Said behavioral modification technique was also known as a “switching.”

And, sometimes it would work for several hours.

One or two deft swats across the bottom with a keen switch was enough to sully even the most behaving youngster and when I grew up on Blair Branch, every mom on the holler kept at least one handy. Mom tended to have several at the ready. On top of the refrigerator, fireplace mantle, cupboard, window-sills and even on the kitchen table, a switch was ever present and with arm’s reach.

Fruit off the switch tree, however sporadic, was processed along with more dependable crops from Pap’s old orchard some half a mile up the mountain behind our house. We spent weeks in July and early August peeling peaches that mom canned by the hundreds of quarts. The peels were steamed for hours until the skins floated to the top of the kettle and the juice was turned into peach jelly. If a fruit was wormy and you had to cut around the worm hole so that you came up with clumps instead of slices, said clumps were crushed and stewed into peach preserves then canned in pint Mason jars.

Suffice it to say that the entire summers of my youth on Blair Branch revolved around daylight-til-dark harvesting and canning dozens of varieties of fruits and vegetables. And peaches were the most aggravating because they attracted yellow jackets by the swarms — but that’s another story. In any event, I came to take peaches so much for granted that I hardly missed them when I went away to college and for several decades thereafter.

But the onset of diabetes this past spring has me searching for anything sweet that doesn’t make my sugar level spike and fresh peaches fit the bill. Sometimes, I believe that a fresh peach in the morning and one at suppertime are the ultimate food on earth.

Still, every time I stop at Kelly’s fruit stand there in Richmond, or browse the produce section of a grocer and bag half a dozen peaches, I grin to myself and vividly recall my sainted Mom’s old switch tree and I still don’t miss it at all.

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