I lay awake wondering what I yearn for and all I can think is to go get that peach. I picked you out because you were a big, firm peach with colors each the right shade and no marks of worms or insects having shared you first. How did they keep those hungry insects from your flesh? For you are an organic peach, which means, at least what I have been led to believe, that means you have not been sprayed with chemicals. And here is where my ode begins.

To eat such a peach cannot be rushed. First I must thank those who have grown you: the immigrant laborer who doesn’t earn enough himself to buy you from the shelves; the soil you drain of nutrients, the water that is beginning to go dry, the tree that for you was a womb. Then I must think to the joys that such a peach can bring, and how my childrens’ children might never know such joys. In my own great desire for such a peach, I have taken another small step to making more of your kind rarer and rarer to find. I have to then thank the truck that drove you from that tree, keeping you at the right temperature, secure in a crate, rushed to the shelf so that you were still a hard peach upon arrival. I like a little crunch in my peach, so I picked you out of the whole bunch.

Would I have plucked you right from the tree? Would I have craved you if a bruise or brown spot freckled your skin? I do not remember how much you cost because all I knew was that I would enjoy eating you. And I live in the bosom of the richest of lives where that can be enough, simply the joy brought by a peach. A peach that once day may just be a memory: if the water dries, if the salt water rises, if the bees stop buzzing, if the trucks go on strike, if the crate ships a necessity, if I cannot buy simply for joy. And so tonight I write an ode to my very special, almost extinct, bringer of joy – my one organic peach.