Who doesn’t like a peach?

There is a peach tree behind our house. I planted it some 20 years ago, along with a few other peaches and half a dozen apples. All the apple trees are still here and have grown quite large but only the one peach remains. The other peaches did okay for a decade or more, then rapidly declined. Peaches, I’ve learned, are not long-lived trees. Unlike apples, they soon grow old and die.

The remaining peach tree is close to the house, just 20 feet away. We have a good view of it from the kitchen and bathroom windows. It is getting a bit decrepit-looking, as are we, though it still gives us peaches. But not every year. In 2023 an unusually late spring frost hit the tree when it was in full blossom and there were no peaches at all. Last year the tree produced a bountiful harvest of quite small fruits — often there was as much pit as there was flesh. But they tasted good and we were glad to have them. We were not the only ones. Other of the farm’s non-human inhabitants seemed to be glad too.

As the fruits ripened, the single peach tree was visited daily by deer, squirrels, chipmunks and a woodpecker-like bird that I’m guessing is a Northern Flicker. Often there were two or three of these birds in the tree at the same time, stabbing the fruits with their long, pointed beaks to determine which were ripe and which were not. Fortunately, for us and the other peach eaters, they rarely stayed for more than a few minutes.

In the early morning and early evening, a doe with two fawns visited the peach tree. Often young bucks with just a point or two of velvet, came to sample the fruit. Occasionally a mature deer stood on its rear legs to grab an especially enticing peach almost out of reach on the tree. Mostly, though, the deer took fruit that had already fallen to the ground. Chipmunks and squirrels, naturally high strung creatures, appeared out of nowhere, snatched a peach then scampered away to consume it in a safer place. All of these peach enthusiasts were quite visible to us through the windows. Mostly, I did not have to go outside to put my old Canon camera to use.

There was a time when I would have been angered to see peaches from a tree I planted being eaten by so many other animals and birds. Moreover, eaten without so much as a chirp, a bark, or a snort of gratitude. I would have been quick to shout at them, wave my arms, even fire a gun in the air. Now, in my golden years, it gives me a strange delight to share the bounty of the peaches with these other creatures, fellow travelers every one, on this often amazing, finite path we tramp along.