Month: November 2020

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Taste and See

I knew it was a lost cause, but late last month I did it anyway: bought a pound of peaches.

October peaches are not peaches, though they may look and feel and even smell fleetingly of the real thing. The rubbery texture is all wrong, for one thing: real peaches are tender with that least little bit of resistance before giving way under your teeth. The juiciness of a late-October imitation is stingy rather than generous, and as for the taste . . . an echo, maybe. Better than “peach flavored” teabags or candy, but nothing like an actual, tree-ripe, farmers-market peach, pouring out authenticity from the first touch to the last slurpy bite.

The same for raspberries, blueberries, cherries, honeydew and almost any other summertime fruit. Less true for apples and pears, but still. That tang, that bite, that complexity in flavor is impossible to duplicate artificially. For lack of a better term, I call it wildness.

The fruit itself isn’t wild—that’s important. The original peach, outside the original Garden, was probably leathery and more sour than sweet. But the potential was tucked within its wrinkly pit, and it was up to countless husbandmen, creative image-bearers, to graft and plant and variegate the fruit that we know today. There may be many varieties, cling and freestone, but they all share the same essence that belongs to that particular fruit and no other. I’ll bet Mesopotamian gardeners and English orchardmen experienced something of the same joy I feel when biting into the first real peach of summer.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. (Ps. 34:8)

A peach, a watermelon, a zucchini, a sweet potato are all good in their own way. There are many, many ways that the Lord is good. He is good as Creator of all the people around our Thanksgiving table, and all the bounty on that table. He is good as the granter of all my senses. He is good in the sweet, and perhaps especially in the sour. He is good in all the ways he’s unlike me. He is good in pleasure (when we often forget him) and even good in pain (where we can’t help but cry out to him). He is good in ease, and even better in difficulty. He is good in the familiar and the unexpected. He is good in sunlight and starlight, clouds and rain. He is good in too little and too much. Not a tame lion, not a loyal servant; not a vendor or a salesman; not predictable, not domesticated, not safe—

But good, in ways we don’t even know yet.

We can’t always feel that goodness, but sometimes we can taste it, even in something as common, and yet as extraordinary, as a peach.

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Growing up with Little Britches

Ralph Moody isn’t as well known as Laura Ingalls Wilder, and didn’t occupy quite the same time period, but he accomplished something similar. My husband and I have been reading through his series of memoirs, which he began writing at the age of 50.

Born in 1898 in Rochester, NY, Ralph’s formative childhood was shaped in Colorado, where the family moved when he was eight years old. There the boy learned to rope and ride, acquiring the nickname “Little Britches” from the local cowboys. After failing at ranching, the Moodys settled in nearby Littleton, where Ralph’s father died as a result of a horse/auto accident. As the eleven-year-old Man of the Family, Ralph took odd jobs and organized the local boys into work teams, and even spent a summer working for a neighbor at The Home Ranch, receiving a man’s wages.

In 1912, for reasons too complicated to detail here, Ralph’s mother abruptly moved the family to her home state of Massachusetts. Starting over with almost nothing, Mary Emma and Company” established a laundry business while Ralph worked a number of side-hustles. All perfectly legitimate, but somehow he got the reputation of a troublemaker and at the age of fourteen he went to New Hampshire to work with his crotchety old grandfather in The Fields of Home. He didn’t get along with Grandfather, but that wasn’t entirely his fault; the old man didn’t get along with anybody.

When America entered World War I, Ralph worked in a munitions plant because the army judged he was too sickly to fight. His puniness was later diagnosed as diabetes, and the family doctor held out one hope for susvival: go west young man, get as much sun as possible, eat lots of green leafy vegetables, and don’t do anything crazy. He obeyed every rule except the last.

Not entirely his fault; the only job he could get upon his arrival in Arizona was performing “horse falls” for the movies. The hard-earned stake he gained from that brief venture began disappearing when he met Lonnie, an overgrown hyperactive kid who talked him into buying a Model T they nicknamed “Shiftless”—a total lemon. Nevertheless, the two young men tore across the Southwest, Shaking the Nickel Bush between breakdowns.

They were flat broke when Ralph hit upon his most productive money-making scheme yet: selling plaster busts to bankers and lawyers in small towns between Phoenix and Santa Fe. (He’d picked up that skill from an engineer at the munitions plant who sold sculpture on the side.) He converted the proceeds to fifty-dollar bills, which he carefully rolled up in the cuffs of his extra-long Levis. It amounted to almost $1000, with which Ralph intended to buy a little ranch and do what he liked best. Unfortunately, when he and Lonnie parted ways the latter absconded with the jeans. Ralph was sure (pretty sure) it wasn’t theft; Lonnie just snuck out in the dark with the wrong pants. And no forwarding address.

We’ve just started reading The Dry Divide, in which our hero hops a freight to Nebraska with one dime in his pocket. The back-jacket copy reveals he will end up with “eight horse teams and the rigs to go with them.” In the next and final volume, Horse of a Different Color, he will court his boyhood sweetheart and settle on a career.

All this, mind you, packed into 25 years: quite a ride, and yet probably not too unusual for the time. Ralph Moody’s America was an open society that allowed for amazing mobility, both up and down. For all his natural gifts, including ingenuity, creativity, and a cheerful disposition, he never made a lot of money and the lean times didn’t end with his marriage. But I doubt he regretted any of it, especially those early years which he recalled much later in loving, meticulous detail. He lived with eyes wide open, observing, remembering, and appreciating.

Though he carried a Bible with him, the family religion relied more on can-doism than Amazing Grace. “God helps those who help themselves” might have been the family motto (although it’s not in the Bible), and one senses more than a little pride in his mother’s determination to accept no help beyond what she absolutely had to. That might not be fair to Mary Emma, who endured severe hardship with amazing resilience and positivity, but she could be stubborn too. As could Ralph’s sister Grace, who could figure and dicker like a man but dropped out of school early because, as Mother said, she wouldn’t need any more education to make a home.

Unlike the Little House books, there’s no overt racism or hostility. “Coloreds” are not particularly numerous out west, and the only Indians Ralph meets are falling off horses for the movie cameras. (As rough as it was for them, it was a lot worse for the horses).

For good and ill, that America is gone: rough-and-tumble, snooze-you-loose, unpredictable, perilous, exhausting, and exhilarating. Racism, favoritism, cops and politicians on the take—nothing new about that. A generally honest, straightforward, enterprising, and upwardly-mobile populace—that was, if not new, then certainly rare. Will we ever see the like again? I wouldn’t bet on it.