The peaches are all gone. Most were brought in or given away. The deer got their share. The last fell to the ground. And now it’s just leaves. We have … many pounds of peaches in the freezer, but you don’t know how much you want one until you can’t have one. That’s what I realized when I walked out to grab one this evening.
I hope our neighbor also got her share. We’d invited them over at peak peach to gather all they could stand. A few days later she brought us over a peach dessert. We were trying to get rid of them, but she brought them back!
She’s a grandmother, and at least one of her granddaughters is about to graduate from college. She’s lived around here, she said, all her life and she’s never had better peaches than what comes from our tree. Given the produce produced here, that’s a good endorsement. Our peaches are small, but they are juicy and tasty, and plentiful. Walking by the peaches in the produce section of the grocery store Tuesday I realized how small ours are. The ones at the store are gigantic!
Maybe I should buy a few and bring them home as a joke.
We returned our neighbor’s dish to her last weekend, trying to think of a thing we can bring to her as a gift. She sent us back across the street with some freshly canned salsa, tomatoes from her sister’s garden.
We also have tomatoes. Our tomatoes are plentiful. It took two trips this afternoon to get in all the ripe ones. And there are a great many still waiting on the vine. There is a giant bowl of currant and cherry tomatoes in the kitchen. Every time I pass by I grab a few, just to try to keep them under control, or under more control than I did with the peaches. But, really, you can only eat a half dozen peaches at a time so many times.
Elsewhere today, progress was made on some fronts. On others, not so much. It’s all quite quixotically quotidian.
I went for a bike ride this evening, just to stretch my legs, and to understand a few new roads. Here’s a video.
I looked at a map and saw that I could ride in one big square and that’d amount to about nine miles. And then I looked a little more closely at the map and saw that there were two roads going across that square, one almost perfectly diagonal, which is where some of these shots came from, I think.
So I did half the square once, and cut the diagonal. And then I did the full square. This was very instructive. Four times in that little 20 mile exploration I sat up and said, “Oh, so that’s how this lays out.” In this case, it meant I’d been there before, from a different direction. Except for the last realization, which was when I figured out how one house showed up on the route twice. It was right at that diagonal road. Things made sense.
Anyway, it was a lovely experience. The weather was mild, the sky had some dramatic clouds, as you can see.
There was no real hurry to it at all. And the roads were quiet. On one road, I traveled for a fair amount of time in the wrong lane, just looking and recording the stuff going the other direction. (Fortunately, the terrain was flat and the roads there were wide open, so this was easy to safely do.) And some of the things look more than familiar because you’ve been by them a few times, they seem perfectly natural.
Soon, perhaps, I’ll come to anticipate the features of the road and the scenery. Because I just went past this bad section of asphalt, that means the stately house is coming up on the left. Since that store went by on the right, I need to watch out for the trees growing too far over the road. It’s just the natural progression of things, I guess. You’ve got to learn the roads, much better than staring at a map, or glancing at one when you get to what feels like a prominent intersection. And after you do that, you start plotting lines because you know where the dips are, where the sand gathers, and you know exactly how to approach that next little roller. That’s when it becomes really, really fun, when it all just clicks into place without too much thinking, which lets your thinking wander, just a bit, when the real thinking begins.
Not there yet, not with all of these new roads, but this was a pleasant kind of ride, with no eye toward the time or zones or anything else. When you want to, you go slow. When you’ve caught your breath and your heart rate is ready and the road is favorable, you lean over the headset and drill it for a while. Aimless, but with at least a little purpose. And my purpose, today, was just to stretch my legs and eat up a few miles. It’s a kind of ride I always look forward to; a kind I’m planning on doing a lot of in the near future.
