30 Days: "The Peach Promiser"

The Peach Promiser

by Clysta Day

April:

“Mattie! I promise I will come and pick every one of these peaches and eat every one of these peaches!” Will exclaimed. Will loved peaches. Who knows why.

Mattie lived all alone in her house and her brother, Will, was visiting that day to help out with things. Today, they were pruning Mattie’s peach trees. Mattie wanted to cut as many branches off as she could. She knew that she’d never be able to keep up with all the fruit her trees would produce. There were even a few small green peaches already growing.

Last year, when Will helped her prune the trees, she had cut off too many branches and Will had been disappointed there were not any peaches to eat. But this year, because of Will’s promise, Mattie decided to keep most of the baby green peaches and branches in tact, and only prune the necessary fruit and limbs.

“O.k., Will, I will keep some baby peaches and branches for you.” Will sounded so sincere.

July:

“Will, the peaches are almost ready to be picked. I think in the next week they will be ready,” Mattie called him on his new cell phone. By now, Will had moved away to go to college, over an hour away.

“I’ll try. I don’t know how I can get there,” Will said.

Mattie coaxed him, “Will, remember you said you would come and pick every one of the peaches and eat every one of the peaches.”

But Will did not have a way to get to Mattie’s house. At this point, Mattie wasn’t sure if Will could actually fulfill his promise.

August:

Another brother, James, came to help Mattie with her yard. He worked on putting in rocks and new plants, picking unused apples, and pulling weeds from the garden. At the end of the day, Mattie paid James and asked if he thought the peaches were ripe enough yet.

“No, they’re still hard. They might ripen up if you picked them and put them in a paper bag.”

Mattie replied, “I have a lunch bag, if you want to take some.” James took the bag and ran down the stairs to go back outside to get the unripened peaches.

Mattie remembered that James had told her how much he loved peaches too, and oh, yes, he was with Will and her when they pruned the peach trees last year. It was both Will and James who had helped her, and they had both hoped there would be enough peaches from all the pruning that year. But there hadn’t been.

This year, she hoped to make it up to at least one of them. I really hope those peaches in the bag ripen, she thought. She was The Peach Promiser after all.

Copyright 2009 by Clysta Day; author retains all rights to the story.