Start of the Happy-Sad Season

Posted September 07, 2007

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It's late at night and I'm freezing peaches. Come early fall, our local orchard sells very cheap and very huge flats of imperfect fruit -- we call them "scratch and dents" -- and they are so ripe that if you so much as look at one funny it dissolves immediately into a puddle of juice and mold. If I were Ma Ingalls, I would of course be canning them -- lining my cellar walls with the glowing promise of full mason jars, wiping my hands on my clean apron, and shooing away Pa when he pinches my pioneering heinie with the canning tongs -- but I'm not. What I am is a person with a love of peaches, a fear of botulism, and a chest freezer in my garage. We peel the peaches, slice them, freeze them on cookie sheets, and then fill gallon-size Ziploc bags with the icy orange crescents. You laugh at me now, and I understand -- Freezing Peaches, what is that? Your porn name? -- but come February, I may slip those peaches into conversation, and you'll think about the spongy clementine you ate (again) for breakfast and wonder if maybe I'm onto something.

I can't recommend peeling peaches highly enough as an activity -- really, you should peel some even if nobody in your family will eat them, just for the experience; throw them away afterwards if you have to. Ten seconds in boiling water and then -- if it's the right kind of peach -- the dark velvet skin slips right away, as satisfying as stripping the sheets of skin from your older brother's sunburned back in the innocent days before you understood that what you were doing was enabling his melanoma. (Of course, if it's the wrong kind of peach, then the whole thing very quickly turns into that scene from Fargo with the wood chipper, and your husband will wander in and raise his eyebrows after you've poured yourself a third glass of wine and are expleting various f-words, bits of peach and peach skin everywhere, which is not at all the kind of Little House on the Prairie scenario you were going for.) But what's underneath a peach skin is the sun itself, caught rising or setting: an orb of red and orange that is so utterly aglow it's as if it's lit from within. And tonight I'm handling these luminous, slippery naked fruits, sitting at my wooden kitchen table with the windows open and such a melancholy tightness in my throat, that when Joni Mitchell's "Rainy Night House" comes on, I burst into tears.

Does this or doesn't this have anything to do with parenting? That's a fair question, and I understand your impatience. The short answer is: It does. This is just such a happy-sad season. (You may already know this about me, but I'm supposed to be writing this column as if we've just met, which can feel a little bit like asking your husband to pretend he's hitting on you at a bar, but to keep pretending for so many nights in a row that he actually does start to seem kind of strange, not that I've ever done that.) I love the return to cool nights, the breeze blowing through our screens so that we actually wake with cold arms, the chilly kids darting down the hallway to squeal into bed with us. I love the good tomatoes, the melons, the disappearing mosquitoes, the excitement of ordering new shoes for these growing children, new striped pajamas in bigger sizes. But then -- well, I navigate change so clumsily. While other parents everywhere are thinking, briskly, "Wow! My son is starting first grade! His first long school days! And with his sister starting preschool, this is an exciting time!" I am stuck in my foolish blues. Is every autumn of my life going to feel like the end of an era? Perhaps so.

Which is not to say that I'm unexcited by the idea of playing hooky from work and spending the morning home alone -- alone in our house, just the two of us -- with Michael and the canning tongs. And yes, it's true that by the end of the summer I am not exactly, how shall I put this, craving extra moments in the day to spend with the kids, these children draped like feather boas around my neck. Like noisy, starving boa constrictors who seem to want to gobble up all the available air molecules around my face and then me, my actual person. But still.

At my parents' house last week, my dad was reading a Richard Scarry book to Ben and Birdy -- they curled up around him on the couch while he pointed out the boa constrictor who fixed the Brazil-bound carnival plane and then all the koala babies in Nurse Matilda's nursery -- and Birdy had her little fat hand slung around his neck. She was absent-mindedly stroking his hair and the back of his head, and my mom and I saw it at the exact same time and made that silent happy-sad basset-hound expression to each other -- the one where you press your lips together and pull your eyebrows up, and it means, "If I could freeze anything in the world it wouldn't be peaches -- it would be time, this time right now, because that is the single dearest moment of my life. And I'm sorry again for that one year when I was so bratty with my kohl eye pencil smeared right on the wet part of my inner eyelid, right near my continuously rolling eyeballs, because surely a child has never loved her parents as much as I love you now." Or at least that's what it meant when I did it -- maybe my mom was just experiencing a visitation from the hot dogs we'd eaten earlier. But I don't think so.

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Start of the Happy-Sad Season

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Start of the Happy-Sad Season

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