Ethyl Surmises: Summer Fruit

Yesterday I prepared some peaches from my back yard tree, and in the process came face to face with a memory. The summer my mother died the peaches on this tree begin to ripen. When my husband cut the back yard grass, he couldn't stand to see them go to waste, so he picked up two five gallon buckets and set them in the kitchen to be 'worked up'.
When I came home from Mississippi after her death and saw the peaches sitting there, I went to pieces. Part of it was pure exhaustion and grief over what I no longer had, but a big part of the problem was dealing with a memory I wasn't prepared to deal with right then. The last thing I wanted to do in that particular frame of mind was peel peaches, and I told him so in no uncertain terms.
You see, peeling summer fruit always made me think of her. Growing up on the farm there was always fruit to be worked up in the summer. Apples and peaches grew on the trees around the home place, grapes grew on the garden fence, blackberries abounded in the pasture, a wild plumb thicket yielded it's fruit in abundance, the spring hollow had a wild huckleberry bush, there was a strawberry patch, and an old worn out pear tree that had seem better days usually managed to produce a little fruit. So summers were always busy. When I was a little girl my job was to wash the canning jars. She would fill a wash tub full of soapy water and submerge the jars and I would wash them because my hands were small enough to go inside the jar. When I grew older and could handle a knife, my job changed to peeling and paring, and packing fruit in the hot jars, waiting to be put in the pressure cooker.
I remember the summer we got a freezer. She wanted the biggest one they had in the store, so it stretched from the kitchen door all the way to the refrigerator. Thus began a new chapter in preserving summer's bounty. We still canned but now we could also freeze, and every summer the freezer was filled to the hilt.
Every year a part of the ritual was what we termed 'corn day'. It was a day we sit aside just to put up corn, and we usually had at least a couple of such days a year. The corn that grew in the spring hollow and in the garden was cooked and eaten as it matured, but the corn we canned and froze came from the field. Daddy's old pickup truck had a hole in the floor board that you could see day light through, but it always came in handy when gathering the corn from the field. It never got out of first gear as we made our journey down the field road, up and down over the red clay gullies, and then back home again loaded with at least a hundred and fifty ears of corn at a time. The rest of the day would be spend shucking and removing corn silks and cutting the corn off the cob, being sure to leave enough to scrape and extract the corn milk.
I let the peaches sit on the floor in the cans for a couple of days and then I decided it just wasn't in me to let them rot, so I peeled them and put them in the freezer. The following winter I was glad I had. We enjoyed the peach cobblers and peach chutney I made from them. Almost two years to the day, I took the last bag out and made a peach pie. And I thought of my mother and smiled.
They say time helps when you are grieving over a loved one, and that is so true. Yesterday as I stood at the kitchen sink peeling peaches, her memory was so vivid it was almost like she was there, but the pain had subsided. I could think about our summers long ago and smile.