It is 6:30 in the morning. The sun is just coming up. That soft golden light that makes everything look peaceful and clean and like the world is a fundamentally decent place. I am standing in my backyard in my pajamas, coffee in one hand, and I am staring at my peach tree. Or rather, I am staring at what used to be my peach tree.
3 weeks ago, that tree had 47 peaches on it. I counted them. I know that sounds obsessive, but when you have spent 3 years nursing a peach tree from a scraggly sapling into something that actually produces fruit, you count. You check on them the way you check on something you love. You watch them go from hard little green pellets to the first blush of pink to the deep amber gold that means they are ready.
47 peaches, ready, perfect, 3 years of work. This morning, there are four. Four peaches on a tree that had 47 peaches yesterday evening when I went to bed. Not fallen, not bird pecked, not damaged by anything natural. Gone.
Cleanly, deliberately, thoroughly gone. The stems still attached to the branches. The fruit simply absent, as if someone had come in the night and collected every one of them with a patience and thoroughness that honestly I have to admire even as it makes my blood boil. I stood there with my coffee and I looked at my four remaining peaches and I thought about my neighbor Gary. And then I had an idea.
The most beautiful, most patient, most perfectly constructed idea I have ever had in my life. It involved peppers. Specifically, the hottest peppers on the face of the earth. And it involved waiting. And it involved the precise moment when Gary reached into what he thought was my fruit garden and grabbed something he was absolutely, catastrophically not prepared for.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning. The story begins. My name is Ellen Parsons and I have lived at 6 Sycamore Court in the Willowbrook Estates HOA community for 6 years. I am a retired biology teacher, 31 years in the classroom and yes, what I am about to tell you absolutely involves things I learned in those 31 years and yes, I am extremely proud of that.
My backyard is my retirement project. When I left teaching I made myself a promise. I was going to grow things, real things, a proper kitchen garden, tomatoes, beans, herbs, squash and fruit trees. I had always wanted fruit trees. There is something about a fruit tree that a vegetable garden cannot give you, a kind of permanence, a sense that you have put something in the ground that will outlast the season and come back next year and the year after.
I planted a peach tree, a plum tree and two apple trees in my first spring at Willowbrook. The apples took well immediately. The plum tree is still somewhat uncertain about its purpose in life, but the peach tree, the peach tree was my pride. Peaches are not easy. They need specific conditions, careful pruning, attention to pests and disease.
I read three books about peach cultivation before I planted mine. I babied that tree through two bad winters and one terrible summer when the aphids found it and I thought I was going to lose it entirely. By year three, it rewarded me with 47 peaches. My neighbor Gary Hutchins lives at 8 Sycamore Court, directly to my right. His backyard shares a fence line with mine, a standard 6-ft wood privacy fence that the HOA requires for all backyard boundaries.