Today's essay by Maxine Kumin

Peaches-to-Be

By Maxine Kumin

For fifty years on our craggy hillside farm in central New Hampshire ornamented with Stonehenge-style boulders we raised horses and took in shelter dogs. Now all the animals are gone but the vegetable garden we maintain on one of our only bits of flat land persists. Four summers ago, working aged compost and ancient manure into our raised beds, we uncovered among the clumps of earthworms and tattered bits of eggshell two unknown sprouts about eight inches high. They didn’t resemble any of our common invaders. Curious, we dug down to expose the roots. There they were: two peach pits cracked open by Nature and straining for the light of the New World.

Anything that had lain fallow underground for over a year deserved some support. We potted them, brought them down to the house and gave them pride of place on the southeast-facing brick terrace where red peppers thrive year after year in old muck baskets. When the fall frosts came, we took our cosseted trees in at night. Winter days when the glassed-in porch temperature rose above 40 degrees they reposed on a bench in the sun. They prospered with all this attention. By spring they were begging to leave their pots.

We planted them ceremoniously on either side of the garden, both in full sun, at least until mid-afternoon shade from the adjoining forest overtook them. Although they appeared to thrive in their new location, it gradually became apparent that the one closest to the pond overflow was no longer looking thrifty. The soil proved too wet for the little one; in July it drooped, lost its leaves in August and succumbed before Labor Day.

At this point I thought it might be useful to consult authorities on the Internet. Had other people had this experience? Or, if they had a spare pit or two, how should they proceed? The amount and variety of information available was staggering. Eat the fruit. Save the center pit. Scrub pit gently with warm water and soft brush to remove any flesh still clinging to it. Dry pit for about 10 days. (It takes longer for larger pits to dry.) Chill pit at a temperature between 35 and 40 degrees. Refrigerators are ideal for this purpose because they consistently control the temperature within this range. An ordinary sandwich bag may be used for this purpose after you punch a few holes in it. Chill peach pit for 90 to 105 days.

How lucky we were that Nature had taken care of all these preliminaries. Directions followed about potting the sprouted pit, growing it indoors, setting it out in the earth when it was eight to 12 inches high. Then: Beginning in the second year, fertilize your peach tree in the early spring before leaf and bloom set and fertilize again in the fall after the leaves have fallen off the tree. Bloom set? In its second year all we had was a little skinny sapling standing alone with its sparse leaves shining in the sun. It was unfertilized but looked healthy. There was no sign of blossom. Did this mean our tree was sterile? Never mind; we cherished it for having survived this far.

When your fruit tree is about two years old it will need to be supported with stakes until its center trunk is strong enough to withstand the wind and the rain in your area. That hadn’t occurred to us. Nevertheless, the “center trunk,” spindly and smooth, stood straight and true. On April 20th of its fourth year, the tree burst into bloom. The word “burst” is no exaggeration; overnight, blossoms appeared. They looked fragile but withstood an afternoon thunderstorm and accompanying wind. Our peach tree had reached adolescence. Not a moment too soon, we staked it. Three odd little swellings, ovoid, green, somewhat fuzzy-looking, formed. Peaches-to-be!

They triggered memories of biting into rich, ripe New Jersey peaches, South Carolina peaches, the peaches of yesteryear sliced over cereal, into yogurt, over ice cream, or best of all, eaten in hand, juices cascading down chins and shirt fronts. But we are warned to be realistic. It is likely the peaches that come from this pit will not greatly resemble the original fruit. This is because most fruit trees have a different type of rootstock grafted onto them and the seed will revert to the original stock.

Never mind. We hereby promise to hold dear whatever peach comes forth from our three babes on the branch. 

From New Hampshire Magazine May 2013

Today's essay by Donald Hall

I read Out The Window in the New Yorker back in January.


I cut it out and put it in my computer desk drawer to have close at hand when I wrote about it. Well, here we are in May. I have thought about this essay a lot in the intervening months.

I first encountered the writing of Donald Hall in what I think is a masterpiece of nostalgic, sometimes elegiac writing, String Too Short To Be Saved published in 1961.


My copy is a second printing twenty years later and autographed by the author when he, his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, and Maxine Kumin visited my little town in 1989. I think back on that magical evening and wonder if I dreamed it. I've read the book twice, and am feeling a pull to go back to those pages again, and soon.

Right from the start of Out The Window, he doesn't flinch from seeing his life as it is.

Today is January, midmonth, midday, and mid-New Hampshire. I sit in my blue armchair looking out the window. I am eighty-three, I teeter when I walk, I no longer drive, I look out the window.

And he tells us in poetic detail about what he sees from that window - the snow, the birds and squirrels, the cow barn,


built in 1865, which he gazes at 'every day of the year.' There is a chickadee perch

a rusty horseshoe, permanently nailed to the doorjamb by my grandparents

He lives in his grandparents' house.


The past is all around him, supporting him rather than crushing him. As he looks out the window, his thoughts turn to his family, of his mother in a nursing home, still reading before she died at almost ninety-one.

A week before she died, she read "My Antonia" for the tenth time. Willa Cather had always been a favorite. Most of the time in old age she read Agatha Christie. She said one of the advantages of being ninety was that she could read a detective story again, only two weeks after she first read it, without any notion of which character was the villain.

As he describes the narrowing of his life, he says that

New poems no longer come to me, with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. [his wife; and his father] When I lament and darken over my dimishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do.

And his pleasure is also mine. If there are to be no more poems, that's alright. I think, in fact I know, that I love his prose even better. I like the details, the descriptions, the longer form of telling.

There is also humor in this lovely piece.

My grandmother Kate lived to be ninety-seven. Kate's daughter, my mother, owed her early death to two packs a day - unfiltered Chesterfields first, then Kents. My mother was grateful to cigarettes; they allowed her to avoid dementia.

And then, Donald Hall offers a most telling sentence, one that I think defines him, as it does me.

When I was a child, I loved old people.
… After a life of loving the old, by natural law I turned old myself.

He writes of that 'antiquity,' that 'unknown, unanticipated galaxy.' We all know this feeling. Remember the first time the young check-out person at the supermarket called you ma'am? That is the beginning - when we are thirty-five, and those who are 20 see us as a whole other generation. What? Me, old? No, I'm the same. You just see me differently. It was Gertrude Stein who most brilliantly said, 'we are always the same age inside.' I wore a tee shirt with her face and that quote when I was younger. I believed it then and I believe it now. When a young friend of Matt and Margaret's said he saw saw me dancing at Rusted Root and knew it was me because of my white hair, I was taken aback, surprised, before I remembered that oh, yeah, I do have white hair now. It's a mysterious realm that we, who are lucky, get to visit. There are indeed 'limitations' and 'narrowing circles' but there are also depths of understanding, appreciation, and remembrance that come with those years. If only more of the young loved old people. Then the condescension, the dismissal by others wouldn't be a part of old age.

This essay is a brilliant piece of writing. It creates in me the strength of feeling that I usually only have when I read poetry.

I am happy to say that there is an online phone interview with Donald Hall done at the time the essay was published. I know twelve minutes can be hard to set aside in a busy day, but I so hope you can listen. There's another interview here.

I've written about Donald Hall quite a few times in my letters. If interested, you may type his name into the search box to find the postings.

I find this photo very touching. It's like his arm is around the chair which should hold his late wife or grandmother or grandfather on that porch where they all sat in their lifetimes.


This is my second essay for the Essay Reading Challenge - 2012

Today's essay by Virginia Woolf

In January, the month of Virginia Woolf's birth, I like to read something by, or about, her. This year I decided to read one of her essays, since I've joined the Essay Reading Challenge. I perused both The Common Reader, and The Second Common Reader and decided upon the last essay in the latter book. Its title was irresistible - How Should One Read A Book? She begins by stressing the importance of the 'note of interrogation at the end of my title.'

Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess.

She recommends that we begin a book with an open mind.

Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.

She discusses the varieties of reading, what she calls, 'classes,' specifically fiction, biography, and poetry. She notes that when we read fiction:

It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different person - Defoe, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy - but that we are living in a different world.

 Biographies offer to 'satisfy the curiosity' we feel as we walk down a street at night and

we linger in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and each floor of the house shows us a different section of human life...

And about poetry, Virginia Woolf says,

The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is no other sensation except that of the poem itself. What profound depths we visit then - how sudden and complete our immersion!

These are but a few examples of the wisdom expressed in the eleven pages of this essay. I can't imagine a reader who will not come away with a sense of companionship with the author, who conveys so much of what we feel inside yet possibly have never expressed to another soul, or even to ourselves. She ends with the idea of a Day of Judgment when

great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards ... the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."

Please do read this essay. It may change your life in a small, or not-so-small way. It is available online here.

Virginia Woolf at Monks House in 1931, a year before The Second Common Reader was published. Today is the 130th anniversary of her birth.



This is my first essay read for the Essay Reading Challenge - 2012.