Bushel Baskets of Peaches



Well I’m home from my little jaunt to Vegas to see one of my sisters.  Tired would not even begin to describe the state I’m in right now, but it was so very nice to see her since it’s been almost three years.

As you can imagine we did very little sleeping and talked non-stop to catch up before the time ran out and it was time to board the shuttle again for the airport.

I came home with laryngitis and blisters on my feet.  We walked just about everywhere we went and that amounted to about 8-9 miles a day.  I know this because she had a pedometer with her and keeps track since she went on her diet.

The only time we caught the bus was to go downtown to

Fremont Street

to “the experience” there because it’s 6 miles each way from the strip where we were staying.  The action there doesn’t get started until dark, so we both didn’t think it would be wise to walk the streets back to the hotel at midnight, or later.

Of course when I called my husband the night before we left, he said, “Are you sick?  What’s happened to your voice?”  But I know this was really a blessing to his ears since he thinks I talk way too much anyway.

But this was about peaches, so I better get to it.

I slept all weekend and today I was standing at the kitchen sink eating a ripe peach before starting to weed through all my email.  I wanted to watch all the wildlife in the back yard and also it was juicy and messy and this reminded me of a childhood story.

In the summers, when all of us were still at home in the sharecroppers shacks, daddy used to bring home bushel baskets of peaches once in awhile from one of the many fruit stands they had in those days.  My grandmother did have one peach tree in her yard, but between the thirteen of us kids (7 of us and 6 cousins) we could strip that tree in nothing flat so it was pretty much off limits so she could use the peaches for baking.

I think those bushel baskets of peaches used to cost about $2 in those days and I suppose that was still a lot of money when you lived on a farmer’s salary.

But they were the most delicious peaches you ever tasted!  They were huge, and very juicy.  Of course being kids everything seems bigger so maybe they were just ordinary size, although, I think the ones you get these days are smaller than the ones back then.

All seven of us would crowd around the big trash can in the kitchen and eat the peaches over that so most of the juice wouldn’t get all over the place.  Of course some still did because there was pushing and shoving going on in the process.

Now this may sound gross to some of you, standing over a trashcan of all things, but it was so much the norm for us to crowd around things all our lives that we thought nothing of it.  We were just delighted that daddy had stopped to get the peaches and we relished the sweet taste among giggles and oooh’s and aaah’s.

I’ll never forget those days and the fruit stands all along the roads overflowing with fruits and veggies.  I guess those are times gone by and people can’t make a living doing that anymore.

Of course I probably mentioned in an earlier post that Rosenberg Mamaw had a large garden, as well as the peach tree, fig trees, pecan trees and a mulberry tree, but we always bought 50 pound bags of potatoes and onions and bushels of peaches at the fruit stands.  I’ll write more about that garden later on as that’s a story in itself with all the remedies my grandmother had for bugs.