Peaches, Peaches, Peaches

 Lots of sugar is as critical to a good peach as it is to a Drive-In movie date.

 I am an experienced peach vendor.  I don’t have a degree but I did my basic training under Peggy Powers and had advanced instruction under Miller Coggins and Ron Frodge plus lots of experience in the field…sorry, I mean orchard.

 For those of you not born under the shade of a Georgia Belle tree, let me give you a little geography lesson.  Fort Mill’s Old Peach Stand, the ramshackle, open- front clapboard building at the corner of 160 and 21 Business was cobbled together across the street on the site where the New Peach Stand is now.

 I first worked there when I was just a pup of 13 or 14.  In that pre-I-77 era, Highway 21 was the main thoroughfare between Columbia and Charlotte and then through North Carolina into Virginia. Tourists returning from Florida got to know Springs Farm as the last chance to take a peck or two of tree-ripened peaches back home to the family.  When the New Peach Stand was built, the old building was dragged across the road.

I cast no aspersions on the New Peach Stand or the Fresh Market…they are a great addition to the Fort Mill area but the real peach experience is all about atmosphere. Along with Big Ernie’s Fireworks and Stuckey’s’ Pecan Logs, tourists loved the “authentic” Southern produce stand experience.

 In my twenties, I began my career as a teacher and consequently had to supplement my income with a summer job.  My friend Miller Coggins was running the Springs Farm at the time and hired me on for summer work.  Please note that I was hired to sell peaches from a blazing hot stand for just above minimum wage.  You would think, as a friend, he would have made me an executive.  The situation worked out well though, Miller didn’t like to pay anybody and I didn’t like to work. I am a quick study and it didn’t take me long to let my education go and speak in a slow drawl.  A big smile and an “Aw, Shucks!” attitude sell a lot of produce.

Often, on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, a family would take Grandma or “Aunt Tillie” for an outing.  Every Aunt Tillie loved roadside stands and were proud to enlighten their families on the finer points of picking out fruits and vegetables.

No one could pinch holes in peaches or strip a dozen ears of Silver Queen corn like Aunt Tillie. She would also lecture the family on how to smell-test a cantaloupe or pick out a sweet watermelon. Sometimes Tillie would have the family gather around while she switched out the best peaches from two or three baskets.

Aunt Tillie used the thumb test.  If you could punch your thumb into the peach, it was too ripe; if you couldn’t, it was “hard as a rock”. Coming to the counter with an embarrassed son-in-law carrying the overloaded, delicately balanced basket, she was shameless and would look you in the eye and tell you the price was too high and that peck baskets used to be bigger.

“Are these Elbertas or Georgia Belles?” she would always ask.  Usually they weren’t. Dozens of new varieties were developed over the years. There were peaches that had been developed from the Elberta but that actual strain was almost extinct.  Springs Farms did have a small orchard of Georgia Belles for sentimental reasons but no one was planting new ones. 

You have probably heard that peaches aren’t what they used to be.  There is more than a grain of truth to that. Those incredibly sweet peaches of the past had no shelf life.  The Georgia Belles, white fleshed peaches far too sweet for my taste, had a shelf life of a day.  They were brought in firm and orchard fresh at about 10 o’clock and by the end of a day in the sun looked like they were used for a pick-up baseball game.  They were well into turning brown and dents showed up wherever they had been touched.  It is not good business to throw out peck baskets of peaches every afternoon. Peach developers learned to trade some sweetness for shelf life. I just may champion the movement for heirloom peaches.

The Silver Queen corn we sold has its own mythology.  It has, for those who have never had my mother’s creamed corn, very small sweet white kernels and the ears always seem too slim to have filled out. Like the peaches, all that sugar means the shelf life is minimal.

The old saw is that Momma (the iconic Southern one in an apron) would tell the nearest child, “Go out to the garden and pick a dozen ears of Silver Queen then run straight back to the house.  If you stumble and drop them, go back and get a dozen fresh ears.”

The local “Aunt Tillies” would always know when the Silver Queen crop was ready. Once the picking began and the corn was in at the Peach Stand, they would ask what time it was picked. If half a day had passed, they would wait until the next load was brought in.  I have seen the pick-up truck come in from the farm with burlap sacks bulging with Silver Queen followed by three or four cars full of somebody’s grandmothers and aunts.

Some days at the Peach Stand were unbearably hot and humid.  In an open-air market, when the wind doesn’t blow, shirts get soaked.  Often I would bring an extra tee shirt so that when one was soaked with sweat I could change.

On one particularly hot July Fourth, three of us were working in that old wooden incinerator and no one was happy about it.  It was so hot that customers stayed away in droves.  About three, the hottest part of the afternoon, a dusty blue Ford Explorer pulled up. The door opened and I heard a voice say, “Come here, Mike!”

I got to the SUV and Mrs. Close, owner of the stand, the orchards and the farm, handed me a half gallon of vanilla ice cream. I took it and she followed me into the building.  I carried the ice cream because she was carrying a fresh blackberry cobbler; berries picked and pie baked by herself.  That was and is the way Anne Close does things.

Suddenly the world was not so bad and the songs of bluebirds filled the air.  We were awed by her kindness and thanked her over and again. However, once we dug in, we knew there was not enough gratitude in three counties for that cobbler and ice cream.

Once while I was working at the stand, someone found a dead body half a mile away. Local TV channels were swarming the area and couldn’t find anyone to interview. Eventually they wandered over to the stand and asked me if I would make a statement.

“I don’t know anything.” I told them.

“Neither does anyone else but we have a deadline.”

I did the interview and told them I didn’t know much but that we usually didn’t have dead people turning up around here.

They ran the story and on Monday morning in the Chester High School teachers’ lounge I heard about it.

“We saw you on television wearing your overalls looking like you had just fed the chickens.” One teacher said. No one disagreed.

Here’s the fun part. For the interview, I had on a baseball cap, a tee shirt and shorts.  People see what they expect to see.

Sometimes Aunt Tillie’s lessons don’t get through.  There are basically two types of peaches, freestone and cling. Freestone peaches, if cut around the longitude, come easily away from the pit. Cling peaches don’t.  Some peaches are called “semi-cling” but I think that’s just nonsense. Aunt Tillie would always ask if the peaches were “cling-free” meaning “freestone”.

Once a middle-aged man sounding very put upon asked if the peaches were “cling-free”. I could see he had been sent on a mission.  “Mama says they have to be cling-free or not to get them.”

“Don’t worry,” I told him, “These are cling-free.”  

He leaned in so nobody could hear him and asked, “What’s that mean?”

Ya’ll enjoy those peaches now. And stop back by next time you’re passing through.

Let me add that no actual Aunt Tillies were harmed in the writing of this episode and any resemblance to any Aunt Tillie, living or dead, is purely coincidence.