The Furious Spinner

First I asked the produce man, "Do you have any of those 59 cents a pound organic peaches you had last week? They were great."

He glanced around. "Actually, we do, but we haven't priced them yet. We'll probably put them out tomorrow."

"Oh, that's too bad," I said, wondering what my next tactic should be. Guilt. That should work. "We live a half hour a way."

"Let me go check," he said and soon disappeared behind the gray swinging doors. While I waited, I took all that was left of the 79 cents a pound organic peaches. In Portland, they would be $2.79 a pound. At that price, we usually got them one at a time.

After a long while, the produce man emerged with a box of small fuzzy-red peaches, grown right here in the Columbia River Gorge. "They're white on the inside," he said, slicing one open. He handed me a piece. I gave it to Mario. (After all, he hadn't washed the peach or the knife. I didn't know where either had been!)

Mario shrugged and said, "It tastes the same to me."

"I'll take them," I said.

At home, Mario carefully poured the peaches out of their bag onto a colorful serving platter in the middle of our Rio Grande table. They would need a few days to soften up. The 79 cent peaches were ready. I turned the oven on to 375 degrees; then I got two large bowls from the cupboard and put them on the table. I put on the apron my mother made with bunches of grapes on it. I began peeling the 79 cent peaches. Mario stood over by the sink and countertop preparing dinner: quinoa and fresh sauteed vegetables. The kitchen window was open and I could hear the chimes singing softly as the wind moved through them. And below the bird feeder, the chocolate crocuses swayed in many directions, a tall partner to the vivid blue salvia in the pot next to them. As I peeled and listened, I suddenly felt lodged right in that moment, and I was happy—ecstatic, actually—to hold this furry "Persian apple" in one hand and cut away the skin to expose the white inside of the fruit with my other hand.

The Chinese identified the peach with immorality. It was the "fruit of Mother Hsi Wang Mu's mystic Peach Garden," Barbara Walker wrote in her Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. "The symbol of human longevity was the old man, Shou Lu, always slyly shown with his finger stuck into the cleft of a fuzzy peach, to reveal the Way to his secret of long life." i.e. the yoni. To the Japanese, the peach was a tree of fertility.

I peeled and sliced three or four of the bigger peaches to equal four cups. I gently stirred in 3 tablespoons of oat flour. (Add some lemon juice if you really don't like your peaches turning browning.) I poured the peaches and flour mixture into a glass pie plate. In a small bowl, I combined 1/8 tsp of nutmeg with 1/3 cup strawberry preserves. Then I spread this mixture on top of the peaches. I put them into the oven and set the timer for 30 minutes. In the meantime, I combined 1/4 cup rolled oats with 1 tablespoon of maple syrup, 1 tablespoon of oat flour, and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla. After 30 minutes, I took out the pie, turned down the oven to 350 degrees, and sprinkled the oats and vanilla mixture over the top of the pie. I put the pie in for 15 more minutes.

Later, after dinner and after the pie had cooled and night dropped into the pink frying pan of sunset and sizzled it into gray dotted with starlight—pinpricks of pink that couldn't bear to leave the day behind—we heard the town fire alarm. A few minutes later, we heard sirens. Then the night was quiet again. We ate our peach pie with soybean ice cream. (If I had my way, I would call peaches "love apples," instead of tomatoes. Do tomatoes inspire love? No, they inspire large quantities of bread for dipping in their sauces. Fuzzy, sweet, tender peaches inspire love.) Mario nodded his appreciation as he ate.

We heard the sound of a helicopter coming into the Gorge. We had heard them before. The coast guard often flew through the Gorge, either on a rescue or on a training run. We waited for the sound to fade away, but it didn't. The house quivered as the helicopter got closer. Mario went to the door.

"It's landing in the school," he said. Across the road.

"Let's go."

We got on our shoes and hurried outside and went across the street. I walked up the grassy hill, the first time I had been on the school lawn since they poisoned it with chemicals several weeks earlier. Several fire trucks and the ambulance, lights flashing, were parked near the helicopter. We could hear the rotors twirling but couldn't see them in the dark.

Soon, other neighbors walked up next to us: the woman from next door whom I had barely spoken to since they moved in last year (and had threatened to use chemicals on their lawn); a man with a radio; two young men, naked except for their baggy shorts, one pushing a stroller with an infant in it. None of us went any closer; instead we left a space the size of a football field between us and the helicopter.

“Anyone know what happened?” one of the boys asked.

We shrugged. “Just that it must be a Life Flight.”

It seemed to take a long time before they brought the stretcher out of the ambulance. It looked as though a child or small person lay on it, but we couldn't really tell. We couldn't see how they got the person on the helicopter, but we heard the engine change tone. The white light beneath it came on, and the helicopter rose. It flew over our heads, barely above the old oak we stood beneath.

"Be safe," I said, watching the helicopter become part of the night. The white light went out; a red light came on. Soon the machine was a blinking bit of pink starlight.

We soon turned and left the field, all of us. As we crossed the road, Mario and I looked down the street and saw another group of people crossing, too. The boy with the child in the stroller said, "You folks have a nice evening now," as he headed toward home. "You, too," we answered.

Mario and I decided to take a walk around town. The fire trucks went by us, on their way back to the firehouse. We waved. Mario and I glanced inside Joe's El Rio and Big River Grill as we walked by. Hardly anyone in the restaurants tonight. I kept wondering what had happened to the person on the Life Flight. I hoped s/he would be all right. We ended up walking by the ambulance garage. I asked one of the EMTs what had happened.

"We can't tell you," he said. "It's against the law."

"Oh," I said. "We figure it must be bad if they had to be Life Flighted."

"Not necessarily," he said. "Sometimes we do it as a precautionary measure."

Was he surreptitiously giving me information? Maybe he was trying to tell me the person was going to be all right.

We said good night and continued following the loop around town, past the fairgrounds and creek, up the hill and back to our house. Once inside the house, I went into the kitchen and looked at the platter full of fuzzy 59 cent a pound peaches. Had the Chinese really believed eating a peach would bring them immorality? Or had they believed the peach tree itself held the secret to immorality? Maybe you had to eat X amount of peaches to become immortal. If you ate a smaller amount than X, maybe you were protected from illness and accidents for a long time.

"You want more peach pie?" Mario asked.

"Maybe a little," I said, "as a precautionary measure."
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