Like a Peach

For years, I’ve cultivated a reputation as an intractable summer hater. No amount of sun-drenched-lilac-scented-firefly-magic nonsense can make up for the heat, the humidity, the bugs. And I won’t claim that anything has changed this year, either. Not really. Rather, I find myself undeniably connected to the season in a way I’ve never been before.

Eight months pregnant with my first child on this first day of summer, I newly understand the very roundness of the season. The visceral fullness. The great inhale of a fertile land as it swells into ripeness—that’s what I feel in my body these days (in theory, anyway). My experience is not nearly so poetic, of course, as I sweat and ache and flop about in irritation. But maybe that goes on under the surface of the earth, as well. We see thickets of plump berries dripping off their vines; it doesn’t occur to us the struggle that went into their development. Is each afternoon thunderstorm actually the groaning and sobbing of another laboring mother?

It isn’t lost on me that I’ve resisted the painful parts of summer all these years. How proud, how strong the earth must feel each year when she sets forth her bounty through her efforts alone. Meanwhile, the dread of discomfort marks me as a weak and feeble coward who will grouse and crawl my way into that lauded state of motherhood. I can’t help but feel out of my depth, unprepared, and frightened. Nature has shaped me soft and heavy as any fruit tree, but I can’t seem to figure out how to set my feet sturdily beneath the ground.

Maybe the earth would understand, though. How must it have been for her that first summer, with no midwife to coax her through that terrible, pulsing abundance…as sunshine and water stirred to life the potential in her belly, as the seeds buried inside her cracked and flowered into something new and beautiful, useful and needy and alive? How confusing, how frightening, how painful and transformative.

I’m romanticizing all of this, I know. My brief, well-medicated stint in a sterile hospital room will be nothing like the slow ripening of even a single peach. I may, after all, sink into motherhood only after labor is long over, with a warm sigh like a branch resettling after harvest. Maybe I’ll even come to appreciate the season as I watch my own sweet summer child blossom year after year. It’s possible, anyway.

As long as the damn mosquitoes stay out of my way.