Peachy bliss in the solstice

Ripe peaches  on sale at every  farm stall along  the country roads. Peaches larger than  oranges, fragrant, golden and fuzzy. And bunches of table grapes clustering and silvered with bloom in tissue paper, ripe purplish figs with a  drop of dark syrup at the tip. I feel giddy with pleasure and  plan to carry out a mid-summer annual ritual:  run a  bath and sit there eating a delectable dripping peach as juices run down my chin.

The countryside out here is a furnace, temperatures soaring,  the veld bristling with heat. But in the orchards and  vineyards, the  sun and  intense heat means sweetness in the fruit.

We walk up to the local library and  pause for a moment’s shade under  pin oaks and a  red-flowering coral tree. Time slows and  eddies out  at this time of year, there is time for everything. Moving between book shelves, I choose Peter Ackroyd on the  literary Lamb family,  there are old cookbooks from the 1940s, detective thrillers,  travel writing, biographies. Neighbours stagewhispering in corners, potted maiden fern and begonias, the clunk of  air-conditioning. Coming out into the heat again, tarmac almost a river under our feet. Mountains  shuttered in  a heat haze.

 

Elsewhere it is the winter solstice, icy and dark. The earth cold and frozen, Demeter/Ceres searching for her stolen daughter, grieving mothers standing bereft in the snow. A beloved old poem comes  back to me  as I watch tiny red fruits fatten on my pomegranate tree.

 

The Pomegranate
Eavan Boland

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

 

 

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