Millions of Peaches

I said I was going to blog Thursdays and I didn't even make it one week. But James and Max have been invited to go watch a movie and eat pizza with the neighbors (which feels BIZARRE...I am not used to people going anywhere, but they play together through the fence all the time anyway so it makes sense) and now I finally have the time. 

Turns out there is one living being that loved the heat wave we had in June and that was our peach tree. Peaches aren't supposed to grow in this part of the world but we apparently have a nice little microclimate. In a typical year we'd get a couple of dozen maybe. Last year we had lovely blooms but no peaches at all. This year...this year we have picked two boxes plus dozens to just eat outside and given bags to two neighbors and a visiting friend...and I STILL have a box of peaches on the porch waiting for me to deal with them before they attract every fruit fly on the planet.

They don't get particularly large...it is the wrong climate for them...but they are good eating. I've never had enough to have to do anything to them besides eat them but this year I got to learn Baking With Peaches 101.

First, I've developed my system for peeling them. In case you're interested, here are my steps: 1) score a little X on the bottom with a paring knife. 2) drop in boiling water for about 2-3 minutes. 3) scoop out with slotted spoon and place in a large bowl of ice water. 4) let soak until cool. 5) grab, peel skin off with fingers. 6) they are free stone peaches so once the peel is off pitting them is very easy, mostly you just grab them and pull them apart. 7) slice and put in recipe or in gallon zip locks for the freezer (I try to freeze about 2 cups per bag or approximately one pie's worth.

In the past week we have had peach pie, scones, and crisp. Everything was appreciate but the scones were a big hit and definitely need to be done again. And I'm closing in on a crisp recipe I like. Which brings me to my mother's recipe book.

In...I dunno when maybe 1988? I know for sure it was typed on the Comodore 128 so that puts it roughly between 1987 and 1991 my mom decided she was going to make a book of her recipes. Which she did. Kind of.

The ones that are typed are excellent and I am SO GRATEFUL. All her bread recipes are like that and it is so fantastic. But she also...you know...collected a bunch of recipes and threw them in this notebook and since I can't ask her I don't know what she used, what she amended, what she never used but always meant to try, any of that. 

For example, she made this zucchini bread...I mean, I dream about this bread. I've never been able to recreate it. All I remember her saying is that it was expensive to make so she didn't do it that often because it had expensive ingredients in it. I *think* it might be a variation on a pumpkin bread recipe she has in there but I know it isn't the zucchini muffin recipe because I've tried that. I was finally able to reverse engineer the peanut butter bars this way. And I don't know which dinner rolls are the dinner rolls. But she did save my ninth grade home ec teacher's pie crust recipe (that thing is the BEST. The secret is a tablespoon of vinegar and an egg go in with the water) that I never would have. So there are trade offs.

So I was thinking about her yesterday as I was blanching peaches to try to get ahead of the fruit flies. She was SO MUCH more domestic than I am. She canned. I'm terrified of canning. She made things from scratch I never would and while I am thrilled that the USDA has made school lunch free for another year because it takes that off my plate she made a mean school lunch.

My mother was a stay at home mom in an era where most of her friends and neighbors weren't. Hers was...but only mostly. When my mom and her siblings were quite little her dad worked in Seattle and her mom was home with them but as they got older their dad ran a business out of their house and their mom handled books and did a lot of other stuff as well to keep it running. I'm pretty sure they all worked there. My mom's friends and neighbors who had little kids in her era...most of them had themselves been raised by stay at home moms and most of them themselves worked. My mom and a couple of others became like the go to moms to be room parents and chaperone field trips and drive carpools and lead Girl Scout troops and do all of that...because they were the ones who were around.

One of the things you lose when you lose a parent young is the ability to have those adult conversations. Like....I was never able to ask her why she chose to stay at home or what she liked about it. She used to say that she always thought she'd go back to work when we started school but she never hit a time when she felt like she wasn't needed. And then I think when she was ready it was difficult to get back in. She didn't have the resume, she didn't have the wardrobe...I know from experience that the longer you are "out" of the work force the harder it is to get back in and my mom was out of it for somewhere around seventeen years.

Her trajectory was odd, actually...instead of getting a job, when I was about fourteen she got the world's WORST jury duty assignment. She was on the federal grand jury, which indicts people for federal crimes. This means a few things, one of them is that she had to go to the federal building in downtown Seattle. My mom didn't drive in the city, like ever. There's a bus directly to downtown Seattle from downtown Tacoma...now. This wasn't true in the early 1990s. She had to take like three buses to get there and it was a two hour trip. But she preferred it to driving. But the other thing about the federal grand jury duty...is that it's 18 months long.

Nope, that's not a typo. I just looked it up and this is still a thing. And because the grand jury indicts people they are not attached to one particular case or trial...they just keep saying yay or nay to indictments. So it's not like other kinds of jury duty where you serve on a jury and then you are done. My mom was required to report for jury duty in Seattle two days every other week for a year and a half. And they were then extended an additional six months and had to sometimes come in on Fridays for the next six months. 

Of course this was like any other jury duty and employers had to excuse people to do the service (one of the administrators at my high school was summoned for the same kind of jury the year after my mom was, they could commiserate.) But for my mom doing this really made it pretty much impossible for her to look for a job during that time. In some ways I think she saw it as practice for going back to work. Yeah, she was only gone four or five times a month but they were long days and we had to get used to cooking for and taking care of ourselves. We were used to leaning on her a lot. Towards the end of jury duty she started substituting at a Christian school her friend was principal at. She taught at that school during the final year of her life. That was the only time during my entire childhood that she worked full time and even then she was a preschool teacher and didn't work the kind of hours even a primary teacher would have to.

I know if she were sitting her talking to me right now she'd say two things, first that she was grateful to have had the time to spend at home with us and second that she probably stayed out of the work force too long. As hard as that jury duty was on her I know that she enjoyed being back in the adult world that she had been out of for a long time at that point. I know she hated commuting and I'm sure lots of parts of jury service had to be pretty awful. 

So that was her story of life as a stay at home mom. And now I'm writing my own. And it's weird and disjointed and I mostly spend a lot of time feeling guilty because I don't keep the clean house that she did and I do a lot more takeout than she ever did and...guilt is real y'all. But two things are true: first of all, a lot of us who knew her including my sister, my aunt, myself and several friends have communally gotten together and let each other off the hook for not being the kind of housecleaner she was because honestly we can't compare and should really stop trying. Also, I have to remember that she died of a heart attack at 48 so prioritizing myself, my exercise, my health...is a really good and important thing as well.

So yep, this process of leaning in to stay at home motherhood and embracing it since it is my destiny at this moment is ongoing. But baking with peaches is delicious and that helps. Even though I need to beg Josh to go to the store for more ice so I can blanch more and more butter so I can make more scones. The truth is I like my bursts of domesticity and while I don't spend nearly as much time in the kitchen as she did I like it when I'm there and it does make me feel connected to her.

Hmmm...what else is going on. Oh, in the ongoing interest of not feeling guilty, I found a set of two journals I had when James was little. One goes through age 2...I don't remember how long I kept it and I'm scared to look but I know I wrote in it at least some. The second one goes from ages two to six and is completely blank...just looking at it makes me feel guilty. So I've decided to take it out and dust it off and keep it for Max. And they will each have a partially completed one. Or something. It made me feel better anyway and I really want to do lots of writing this fall...for some reason I always like to write in the fall. I've been planning out my September reading and there's lots of writing in there...journals of authors, writing books, that kind of thing.

I guess that means I should do media consumption because I read the coolest book. It is called Why She Wrote and it is a graphic novel about the pivotal moments in the lives of women writers of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century. Lots of great variety...Austen and the Bronte sisters and Alcott are in there but so is a Harlem Renaissance poet, Beatrix Potter, Mary Shelley, etc. It's a wonderful book. I'm listening to their podcast which is good but not nearly as good as the book. It's called Bonnets at Dawn.

I also finished the sophomore in high school Betsy-Tacy book that I was rereading this week. And I read my book club book which was Just Kids by Patti Smith but then book club was cancelled. It wasn't really my sort of book. I also listened to Catherine Called Birdy this week because I read The Midwife's Apprentice last week. Catherine Called Birdy was good, I like that one. Recommend it on audio. This morning I finished Lois Lenski's Strawberry Girl which I can't imagine a modern day kid finding interesting but as I'm not a kid I liked it. And today I started Take a Hint, Dani Brown for read a romance month. TV...Josh and I have made progress on Schitt's Creek and I'm really just watching Grace and Frankie on loop I might need an intervention. 

Today I'm grateful for friends and neighbors, peaches even though they're driving me bonkers, baking, my husband, my kids, parks, rain, family, me time, books, and everyone's continued good health.