Farm Stand Eating

We have had a stretch of farm stand eating. You may say, "Of course--it's July--it's how we're all eating." But I spent 24 years in South Florida, where summer is not a growing season, where growing any sort of vegetable during any month takes planning and good fortune and is likely to end in tears.One summer, I wanted peach cobbler in the worst way, a homesickness that was wrapped up in missing my elders that had died, missing friends far away. I stood by a display of overpriced peaches, not one of which had any kind of smell: not peach, not rot, not any smell at all.*I wanted to cry.And because I'm an English major, I thought of those lines from Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale": "Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,She stood in tears amid the alien corn"I thought about tears and alien produce and how I didn't really like peaches much anyway, and then I moved along. I thought about my peach triggered homesickness a few weeks…