Do I dare?

The peach has been sitting on the dining table for three or four days, looking uglier by the minute, mottled and split and entirely unappealing. First it was hard as a rock and then, as it softened, it attracted a swirl of fruit flies. Who would pick such an unlikely peach? Who would dare to eat it?

That was our entire peach harvest sitting on the table, this one peach. A peach tree we planted up the hill a few years ago finally started producing peaches this season, but they stayed small and hard and were eaten by deer and raccoons; the peach on the table, on the other hand, came from a tree we planted just a few months ago, a tiny sapling that had no business producing fruit.

And yet it did: it made one big, plump, ugly peach that we picked last week while it was still hard, and then it sat and waited for someone brave enough to take a bite.

This morning my husband cut up that peach, eviscerated the icky spots, removed the ugly peel, and sliced half of it into my breakfast cereal.

It was good. Really good--the sweetest, juiciest, most luscious peach I've ever eaten. A tree from which we expected nothing produced one perfect piece of fruit, and it was very good. 

If that peach suggests anything about the nature of my fall classes (which start today!), I'll be on the lookout for the unpromising student who hands in a peach of a paper--but I'll also keep a sharp eye out for the pit!