The smell of hot sugar and ripe yellow peaches always brings back the dry heat of August 1979, when the air in our valley hung still and heavy, and the world seemed to tilt on its axis for the Hollis family next door. I reckon most folks remember that summer for the drought that burned the pasture grass down to gray stubble, but I remember it for the sound of small, hurried steps coming up my back porch stairs and the sight of twelve-year-old Clara Hollis standing in my doorway with her eyes swollen red and her shoulders pulled tight to her ears.
Her mother had passed away just three days before in the county hospital, and her daddy was a quiet, broken man who spent his daylight hours out in the feed store trying to figure out how to be both mother and father to a little girl. He didn’t know what to do with her, and honestly, I didn’t quite know what to do with a grieving child myself, but I knew the peach trees in the orchard were dropping fruit faster than we could eat it. So I put her to work in my kitchen, tying a flour-sack apron around her narrow waist and showing her how to slip the skins off scalded fruit with the tip of a paring knife. All that August we canned, tomatoes and beans and peaches, working side by side in the steaming room while the cicadas screamed in the elms outside. She had small, quick hands that could pack a quart jar tighter than mine ever managed, and she cried some while she worked, silent tears running down her cheeks into the sugar bowl, and I let her because there wasn’t a earthly thing I could say that would fix what was broken inside her.
That fall, her daddy sold the acreage to the bank and packed whatever would fit into the bed of a rusted-down Dodge pickup, and they moved up north to some factory town in Ohio where the air tasted of coal smoke. I never got a letter, and I never got a Christmas card, not a single line in forty-seven years to tell me if she grew up tall or if she forgot the way we scalded tomatoes over a low blue flame. But I didn’t need one, or at least I told myself I didn’t, because a farm wife learns early on that people come through your life like weather moving across the ridge, staying just long enough to drop some rain before blowing over the horizon. I kept my own counsel, tending my garden and putting up jams every summer by myself, watching the seasons turn from green to brown and back again while the years piled up like fallen leaves in the orchard.
The old Hollis place went through three different families, each one tearing down a porch or painting over the trim until you wouldn’t even know where the girl had slept, but the memory of those sticky August afternoons stayed tucked away in the back of my mind like an old quilt folded in a cedar chest. I figured she had her own life up there in the industrial sprawl, maybe children of her own and a modern kitchen with a dishwasher, far away from woodstoves and copper kettles and women who didn’t know how to comfort a motherless child with anything more than a wooden spoon and a bushel of fruit.
Last month, the heat was just as bad as it had been back in seventy-nine, and I went down to the county fairgrounds mostly to get out from under the ceiling fan and see what the neighbors had brought for the exhibition hall.
The air inside the agricultural tent smelled of sawdust, damp ribbon, and fried dough, and I walked slow down the center aisle, nodding to folks I’d known since we were girls in saddle shoes before stopping by the canning tables where the prize jars sat lined up on tiered boards covered in white butcher paper. The blue ribbon in the canning tent went to a jar of peach preserves, set right in the center under the judging lamps so the syrup glowed like liquid amber. I squinted through my bifocals at the little cardboard tag tied to the wire bail with a piece of faded butcher’s twine, trying to read the neat, sloping cursive written in black ink by some clerk who probably didn’t know a clingstone from a freestone. The card tag said the winner learned to can from a farm wife named Ruth, the summer her mama died. I was staring when a woman stepped beside me and said my name, and I turned to see…
A woman who was looking at me with the exact same wide, dark eyes that twelve-year-old Clara had carried out of my kitchen four decades ago, though the lines around her mouth were softer now and her hair was shot through with silver like winter frost on a cedar bough. She didn’t say anything for a long second, just stood there with her hands folded over the strap of a leather handbag, breathing in and out like she had run all the way from the parking lot. I couldn’t move my boots off the sawdust floor because my brain sort of stopped working, trying to bridge the gap between the skinny girl in the feed-sack apron and the grandmother standing in front of me with tears standing in the corners of her eyes.
“Ruth,” she said again, softer this time, like she was checking to make sure I wasn’t just a ghost she had dreamed up during a long Ohio winter. “It’s Clara. Clara Hollis.”
My throat felt tight and dry, like I’d swallowed a mouthful of chaff from the threshing floor. “Clara,” I managed to get out, and my voice sounded thin and old even to my own ears. “Well, look at you. You got old on me while I wasn’t looking.”
She let out a little half-laugh that hitched right in the middle, and she reached out, her fingers catching my forearm through the sleeve of my cotton dress, the grip just as firm and sure as it had been when we were packing hot peaches into glass jars together. “I told myself I wasn’t going to cry,” she said, looking down at the blue ribbon resting against the glass of the prize jar before looking back up at my face. “I entered these under your method. The exact way you showed me that August. I used the copper pot I bought off a dealer in Canton twenty years ago, and I stirred it with the wooden paddle my husband carved for me when our first girl was born.”
We didn’t stay in the crowded exhibition hall because the noise of the tractor pull outside was starting to shake the corrugated metal roof, and people were pushing past us to see the prize-winning pumpkins. Clara took my elbow, guiding me out through the double doors into the glaring late-afternoon sun where the gravel parking lot shimmered with heat waves rising off the hoods of pickup trucks. We walked over to a wooden bench sitting in the patchy shade of a dying maple tree near the livestock barns, the smell of alfalfa and horse linoleum hanging thick in the air around us. She sat down first, smoothing her skirt over her knees, and I sat beside her, feeling the old bones in my hips creak against the weathered slats while the cicadas started up their high, thin evening song in the brush.
“I’m sorry I never wrote,” she said right off, staring down at her own shoes like she was examining a stain on the leather. “My daddy was… well, he wasn’t a letter-writing man after we left. And then after he passed, things just got away from me. I got married, had the girls, worked the register at the hardware store for thirty years. But every time August rolled around and the peaches came in at the roadside stands, I’d find myself back in your kitchen, Ruth. Every single year. I can still smell the woodsmoke on your apron.”
I looked at her profile, at the curve of her jaw that looked so much like her mother’s on the day we laid her in the red clay behind the Baptist church. “You were just a child, Clara,” I said, and my hand went out to pat the back of her hand where it rested on her lap. “Children don’t owe letters to old farm wives. You had a hard road to walk, getting dragged up to Ohio with a grieving father and no mother to show you how to be a woman. Surviving all that was enough work for one lifetime.”
“It wasn’t just surviving,” she said, turning her head to look right at me, her eyes very bright and clear in the slanting sunlight. “You gave me something to hold onto when everything else was falling apart. When my hands were busy with the fruit, I didn’t have to think about the hospital or the empty bedroom next to mine. You let me cry, but you made me finish the jars. You told me that good work doesn’t care if your heart is broken.”
“Did I say that?” I asked, half-smiling because I didn’t remember being so wise back then, mostly just tired and worried the jars wouldn’t seal before dark.
“You did,” Clara said. “Every time I wanted to throw the paring knife down and run out into the weeds. You told me to keep my mind on the edge of the blade and the heat of the stove.” She reached into her handbag and pulled out a small, folded piece of paper, smoothing it out against her knee before handing it to me. “I moved back south last month. My youngest daughter is settled in Bowling Green, and I bought a little place with three peach trees out back. I’m home, Ruth. I’m really home.”
I took the paper, though my eyes didn’t need to read the address to know where she meant, because there’s only one road in this county that follows the curve of the creek past the old limestone quarry where the Hollis farm used to stand before the bank took it. The numbers were written in that same neat, sloping hand I’d seen on the fair tag, clear and steady like a fence line built by a man who knew how to sink his posts deep into the clay.
“Well,” I said, folding the paper twice and tucking it securely down into the pocket of my apron where it wouldn’t blow away in the draft. “It sounds to me like you’ve got a lot of fruit waiting to be put up, and my kitchen stove has been sitting idle too many summers since my knees started giving out.”
Clara stood up from the bench, brushing a speck of dust from her skirt, and offered me her arm the way a daughter helps an aging mother down a steep flight of steps. “I brought a loaf of soda bread in the car,” she said, her voice dropping down into that easy, comfortable rhythm that felt like we hadn’t spent forty-seven years standing on opposite sides of a state line. “And I thought maybe we could go back to your place, open a jar of those preserves, and see if your cellar shelves still smell the same.”
We walked together across the crunchy gravel toward my old sedan, the sun dipping low behind the western ridge and turning the sky the color of a bruised peach. The fairgrounds were starting to empty out as the tractor engines died down and the families loaded their tired children into the back seats of station wagons and trucks, but we didn’t hurry, because we had all the time in the world now that the waiting was over. When we got to the farmhouse twenty minutes later, the screen door gave that familiar, high-pitched squeak it had made since my husband hung it back in sixty-two, and the air inside smelled of dry cedar and old floor wax just like it always had. We didn’t turn on many lights, just let the last bit of the golden evening pour through the kitchen windows while the crickets started up their heavy summer humming in the high grass by the well-house. Clara filled two mismatched mugs with hot tea from the black iron kettle on the stove, and we sat together at the scarred oilcloth table where we had pitted bushels of fruit nearly half a century ago, sharing a slice of bread spread thick with golden peach preserves as the dark finally settled over the valley.
