Roots

Grandma says that peaches are the best fruit. Sticky and sweet, with yellow flesh and rosy cheeks, and pink in my mind's eye. A salve for mental wounds, she said. She grew up with the greatest big peach trees in her backyard. They overlooked her farm with its golden rye and indigo grass so fragrant it bit the roots of my throat. She sang her peaches soft in the summer and reaped them ripe for her brothers and watched them grow in the French sun, dancing with them when they fell and loving them into pâtisserie. These days I pick her peaches as she watches for the last time the trees that touched her mother, and hers before, and water the ground when her fingers are too old. Doing my part in the namesake of sisterhood for the indefinite daughters to come. These are the peaches, great pink European peaches, That are the sweetest.