From below the branches it’s easy to mistake a ripe leaf for a Red Haven, and the rapid rain that drives us under shallow eaves might be misconstrued as urgency, but nothing is urgent here: not the cattails blowzy by the pond; not my daughter’s short steps through sodden rows of unmown clover; not the sunny fuzz of each fruit’s underside, flesh that would be rosy if not for its own shadow. At home on the kitchen table, we tally our bounty: precisely forty peaches and not one ready, to my daughter’s dismay. Impatience, for all its false rush, has been my own longtime companion, and so I try not to shoo her grasping hands. How slowly I am learning to love: not only what takes time, but the time it takes.
