Lovely Peaches Quotes

Nobody loves me, nobody cares, Nobody picks me peaches and pears. Nobody offers me candy and Cokes, Nobody listens and laughs at me jokes. Nobody helps when I get into a fight, Nobody does all my homework at night. Nobody misses me, Nobody cries, Nobody thinks I'm a wonderful guy. So, if you ask me who's my best friend, in a whiz, I'll stand up and tell you NOBODY is! But yesterday night I got quite a scare I woke up and Nobody just WASN'T there! I called out and reached for Nobody's hand, In the darkness where Nobody usually stands, Then I poked through the house, in each cranny and nook, But I found SOMEBODY each place that I looked. I seached till I'm tired, and now with the dawn, There's no doubt about it- NOBODY'S GONE!!

Every life needs a little space. It leaves room for good things to enter it.

There was her face, like a summer peach, beautiful and warm, and the light of the candles reflected in her dark eyes. [He] held his breath. The entire world waited and held its breath.

Girls get screwed. Not that kind of screwed, what I mean is, they're always on the short end of things. The way things work, how guys feel great, but make girls feel cheap for doing exactly what they beg for. The way they get to play you, all the while claiming they love you and making you believe it's true. The way it's okay to gift their heart one day, a backhand the next, to move on to the apricot when the peach blushes and bruises. These things make me believe God's a man after all.

...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.

We're connected, as women. It's like a spiderweb. If one part of that web vibrates, if there's trouble, we all know it, but most of the time we're just too scared, or selfish, or insecure to help. But if we don't help each other, who will?

Her grandmother used to tell her that a pink sky meant someone in the distance had just fallen in love . . . .

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together...

Poor Earthworm,' the Ladybird said, whispering in James's ear. 'He loves to make everything into a disaster. He hates to be happy. He is only happy when he is gloomy.

People fall in love all the time. And it's not always with the right people. And it's not always reciprocated.

Amor" So many days, oh so many days seeing you so tangible and so close, how do I pay, with what do I pay? The bloodthirsty spring has awakened in the woods. The foxes start from their earths, the serpents drink the dew, and I go with you in the leaves between the pines and the silence, asking myself how and when I will have to pay for my luck. Of everything I have seen, it's you I want to go on seeing: of everything I've touched, it's your flesh I want to go on touching. I love your orange laughter. I am moved by the sight of you sleeping. What am I to do, love, loved one? I don't know how others love or how people loved in the past. I live, watching you, loving you. Being in love is my nature. You please me more each afternoon. Where is she? I keep on asking if your eyes disappear. How long she's taking! I think, and I'm hurt. I feel poor, foolish and sad, and you arrive and you are lightning glancing off the peach trees. That's why I love you and yet not why. There are so many reasons, and yet so few, for love has to be so, involving and general, particular and terrifying, joyful and grieving, flowering like the stars, and measureless as a kiss. That's why I love you and yet not why. There are so many reasons, and yet so few, for love has to be so, involving and general, particular and terrifying, joyful and grieving, flowering like the stars, and measureless as a kiss.

The Bible doesn’t tell us exactly why God wasn’t satisfied with the fruits and veggies Cain offered up. Maybe he kept the juiciest peaches and sweetest mangoes for himself and offered God nothing but brussels sprouts and spinach.

The bitch is very nice. She is as sweet as a Georgia peach. But inside every sweet peach is a strong pit. And this means she won't explain the obvious when a man is disrespectful.

Like" as a friend. "Like" as respect. There are so many different kinds of "likes." So when does "like" turn into "love"? Where's the boundary?

That's the fairy tale. You meet, you fall in love, you kiss, and neither of you is revolted by it. You get married and have kids and live happily ever after.

Coffee, she'd discovered, was tied to all sorts of memories, different for each person. Sunday mornings, friendly get-togethers, a favorite grandfather long since gone, the AA meeting that saved their life. Coffee meant something to people. Most found their lives were miserable without it. Coffee was a lot like love that way. And because Rachel believed in love, she believed in coffee, too.

Her little shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it. 'I love love,' she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our stories were told; we subsided into silence and sweet anticipatory thoughts. It was as simple as that. You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this world; this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul, and I told her that.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience.

A strong relationship is an honest relationship, and no honest relationship is all peaches and cream. Love is the key. Where love abides, anger is but a passing visitor.

A glorious future beckoned on the horizon. Yet I still clung to a shred of my past, as a flowering peach blossom tree yearning for its fallen bloom.

you are ever the only one i want to give all the peaches in my heart to the only one by whom i want them bruised.

Loyalty was a funny thing. So was love. They both bit you when you least expected it.

I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.

What mattered was stil there. That was what they all felt, and what surprised them all. What mattered couldnt be shaken.

Eighteen luscuios scrumpitous flavors, Chocolate,Lime and Cherry Coffee,Pumpkin, Fudge-Banana, Caramel Cream and boysenberry. Rocky Road and Toasted Almond, Butterscotch,Vanilla Dip, Butter Brinkle, Apple Ripple,Coconut,and Mocha Chip, Brandy Peach and Lemon Custard. Each scoop lovely.smooth and round. Tallest cream cone in town lying there on the ground.

I almost miss the sound of your voice but know that the rain outside my window will suffice for tonight. I’m not drunk yet, but we haven’t spoken in months now and I wanted to tell you that someone threw a bouquet of roses in the trash bin on the corner of my street, and I wanted to cry because, because — well, you know exactly why. And, I guess I’m calling because only you understand how that would break my heart. I’m running out of things to say. My gas is running on empty. I’ve stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you but could only find rain and more rain and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, like an orchestra. I wanted to tell you that I’m not afraid of being moved anymore; Not afraid of this heart packing up its things and flying transcontinental with only a wool coat and a pocket with a folded-up address inside. I’ve saved up enough money to disappear. I know you never thought the day would come. Do you remember when we said goodbye and promised that it was only for then? It’s been years since I last saw you, years since we last have spoken. Sometimes, it gets quiet enough that I can hear the cicadas rubbing their thighs against each other’s. I’ve forgotten almost everything about you already, except that your skin was soft, like the belly of a peach, and how you would laugh, making fun of me for the way I pronounced almonds like I was falling in love with language.

But one thing she [Rachel] did believe in was love. She believed that you could smell it, that you could taste it, that it could change the entire course of your life.

I love these dudes, but I don't know what they're doing with all that facial hair these days. There's a lot of peach fuzz going on. They called me up to go to a Kanye West concert, and I was like 'hold on I'll call Kanye.' So I called him and they got into the show, and I called Kanye later and said, 'Yo did you see my dudes from Panic! at the show?' and he was like 'Nah they mst not have been dressed like they were from the 1700's'. But I back them. They have their own unique style, which is cool.

One of the things women have to get out of their mindset is the notion of what a bitch is. A bitch is nice. She’s sweet as a Georgia peach. She smiles and she is feminine. She just doesn’t make decisions based on the fear of losing a man.

Here is something that Peach, one of the Casserole Queens, says about men and women and love. You know that scene in Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo is standing on the ground looking longingly at Juliet on the balcony above him? One of the most romantic moments in all of literary history? Peach says there's no way that Romeo was standing down there to profess his undying devotion. The truth, Peach says, is that Romeo was just trying to look up Juliet's skirt.

She knew what it felt like to stand in front of someone and ask them to love you, to try to pull them to you by the sheer force of your desire, a force so strong it felt as though you were going to die from it.

Dear Nintendo, We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she’s ‘damaged goods’, a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom ‘do you still love me?’ you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even.

You are blood. You are sisters. No man can break that bond.

I changed your life.” She looked down at the peach they shared. “You changed min. I’m glad of it.” And back into his eyes. “Every day. I’m glad of it. I’d like a pond, and maybe something to sit on so we could watch the creepy, interesting fish.” “That would suit me very well.” She linked her arms around his neck, laid her cheek on his. Love finds a way, she thought.

I'll definitely make you fall in love with me. So prepare yourself.

I grow old … I grow old …I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

It's a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it's paradisaical if she or he loves you back, it's unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves luck, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.

…quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there

I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.

I've seen spring come to the orchard every year as far back as I can remember and I've never grown tired of it. Oh, the wonder of it! The outrageous beauty! God didn't have to give us cherry blossoms you know. He didn't have to make apple trees and peach trees burst into flower and fragrance. But God just loves to splurge. He gives us all this magnificence and then, if that isn't enough, He provides fruit from such extravagance.

all we have is our deep and abiding love for each other. We can't loose that or we loose ourselves. If we don't help each other, who will?

I've already given in because I love you.

Maybe that's what our friendship was. It was the feeling that we didn't have to speak or explain. We could sit in the darkness and watch the tadpoles just as easily as we could lie out in the heat and breathe in the smell of peaches and gravel, all without saying a word.

just like peaches," he said, stripping off her panties. "And I love peaches." -Wrath

Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hot by pies? We taste custard we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.

I loved weather, all weather, not just the good kind. I loved balmy days, fearsome storms, blizzards, and spring showers. And the colors! Everyday brought something to be admired: the soft feathery patterns of cirrus clouds, the deep, dark grays of thunderheads, the lacy gold and peach of the early morning sunrise. The sky and its moods called to me.

Otherwise I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.

Love ambushed you, it lay in wait, dormant for days or years. It was the red thread, the peach stone, the kiss, the forgiveness. It came after you, it escaped you, it was invisible, it was everything.

Being mindful of Aunt Kathy’s presence, I turned to reading the Bible while sitting in the living room. It was my way ofkeeping my aunt at bay. Yet, my facade didn’t sustain me for long. I got called to the dining table anyway. Next, I was told to follow Jerry’s instructions once we left the house. Then to my surprise, Aunt Kathy made breakfast for me anyway. Immediately, I was on high alert! “Oh hell, how do I get beyond this meal!” There I was staring at bread blackened on one side and too soggy to fall off the plate. The bacon was two inches thick and fried hard enough to be a shoe insert. The grits had settled to a pace. My eggs were a perfect substitute for popcorn. Even though I had no appetite, I had to gobble something down or risk being ridiculed by my aunt. Aunt Kathy made her own homemade peach preserves. It was extremely sweet and more concentrated than Playdough. I knew if she saw me using her sauce, she’d overlook the other items I left untouched. If lucky, thefermentation was potent enough to buzz me all day long. So, I made sure she’ll see me spreading that paste all over my charcoal toast. Of course, I made the yummy sound “yums” as I took bite after bite. Fortunately, Aunt Kathy fell hook, line, and sinker for my facade. “I seeyou love that jelly! But I’m not going to let you eat all my jam! People will pay lots of money for that good stuff!” “Yes Ma’am,” I said. Simply amazing! Being she had food she thought I liked, there was a limit.   But if I hated something then I had to be force-fed. As Aunt Kathy talked, I fumbled and moved my food around as she gave me directives for the day. “When school is over, make sure to wait on the steps for your brother.” “Yes Ma’am,” I said once again.

Willa?" "Yes" "It's morning and I still love you.

I love you more than applesauce, than peaches and a plum, than chocolate hearts and cherry tarts and berry bubblegum. I love you more than lemonade and seven-layer cakes, than lollipops and candy drops and thick vanilla shakes. I love you more than marzipan, than marmalade on toast, oh, I love pies of any size, but I love YOU the most.

Picture to yourself the most beautiful girl imaginable! She was so beautiful that there would be no point, in view of my meagre talent for storytelling, in even trying to put her beauty into words. That would far exceed my capabilities, so I'll refrain from mentioning whether she was a blonde or a brunette or a redhead, or whether her hair was long or short or curly or smooth as silk. I shall also refrain from the usual comparisons where her complexion was concerned, for instance milk, velvet, satin, peaches and cream, honey or ivory, Instead, I shall leave it entirely up to your imagination to fill in this blank with your own ideal of feminine beauty.

No I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be Am an attendant lord one that will do To swell a progress start a scene or two Advise the prince no doubt an easy tool Deferential glad to be of use Politic cautious and meticulous Full of high sentence but a bit obtuse At times indeed almost ridiculous— Almost at times the Fool. I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind Do I dare to eat a peach I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us and we drown.

Cherry" Love I said real love, it's like feeling no fear When you're standing in the face of danger 'Cause you just want it so much A touch From your real love It's like heaven taking the place of something evil And lettin' it burn off from the rush Yeah, yeah (Fuck) Darlin', darlin', darlin' I fall to pieces when I'm with you, I fall to pieces My cherries and wine, rosemary and thyme And all of my peaches (are ruined) Love, is it real love? It's like smiling when the firing squad's against you And you just stay lined up Yeah (Fuck) Darlin', darlin', darlin' I fall to pieces when I'm with you, I fall to pieces (bitch) My cherries and wine, rosemary and thyme And all of my peaches (are ruined, bitch) My rose garden dreams, set on fire by fiends And all my black beaches (are ruined) My celluloid scenes are torn at the seams And I fall to pieces (bitch) I fall to pieces when I'm with you (Why?) 'Cause I love you so much, I fall to pieces My cherries and wine, rosemary and thyme And all of my peaches (are ruined, bitch) Are ruined (bitch) Are ruined (fuck)

Regret and pangs of conscience are feelings we assign to others to make the world seem a little more fair, to even things out a little and provide consolation. In reality, those who do wrong to us never think about us as much as we think about them, and that is the ultimate irony: their deeds live inside us, festering, while they live out in the world, plucking peaches off trees, biting juicily into them, their minds on things lovely and sweet.

It's stupid because I don't even know her, but sometimes you see someone and there's just this flicker. Like a light bulb that glows around the person, making them shine brighter than all the others. It's not that they're more attractive or smarter or funnier than anyone else. It's just they have a combination of all the things that speak directly to you.

Adeline has always loved to watch him work, to see the figures take shape, as if they were there all along, but hidden, like pits in the center of a peach.

I swallowed love whole like a peach, juice dripping down my face. the pit is rotting in my stomach and here I am.

what mattered was still there. That was what they all felt, what surprised them all. What mattered couldn't be shaken.

Do I dare to eat a peach?

I still carry you on the insides of me: cave paintings on rib-caging. If I were a peach, you would be the pit that holds me all together. When I met you, I was something small and whole; I do not know how to get back there. You have the warmest heart I have ever set up camp in. I still carry you on the insides of me: the contents of my suitcase heart. I will lug you around until it breaks my back and then some. I feel sometimes like I have scattered my pieces everywhere, but you are the piece I do not know how to leave at the foot of a stranger’s bed or between the lines of a free-verse poem. I want you to know that loving you is freeing; that loving you is like holding my head under water and coming up new again and again. I still carry you on the insides of me. This will not always make sense to you

Sometimes it's easier to block out our feelings toward someone because the alternative is to feel the pain.

To a man genuinely and deeply in love, there is no greater sorrow in the world than a broken heart. Love hurts. Without the love, where could the hurt come from?

I never planned on loving you, Peach. But now, I never plan on stopping.

Meg allowed the Hunters to grab her and Peaches. Then the Hunters slapped some sort of mechanisms on the sides of their belts and shot back up their ropes as if the laws of gravity were mere recommendations. Motorized winches, I thought, a very nice accessory. If I lived through this, I'm going to recommend that the Hunters of Artemis make T-shirts that read WENCHES WITH WINCHES. I'm sure they'll love that idea.

[David Starr Jordan] claims that salvation lies in the electricity of our bodies. “Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,” he writes in a syllabus from around the same time, “from the exercise of functions; from self-activity.” Don’t overthink it, I think, is his point. Enjoy the journey. Savor the small things. The “luscious” taste of a peach, the “lavish” colors of tropical fish, the rush from exercise that allows one to experience “the stern joy which warriors feel.

Eating the peach is a meditation. Your mind empties of all the must dos and should have dones. You are pure being. Your lover’s tongue is the key that turns the lock that opens the pleasure box. Life has few perfect moments; moments of cunnilingus score the highest on the sex blissometer.

I love it. I mean – it’s great. You – how beautiful you look. It threw me off. And you have no idea how much I love peach pie, a-la-mode. Sorry… sue me, dock my pay, but damn, girl. You’ve turned me into a stuttering fool.

She unlocked the door, and they walked through to the small backyard. It was fall, and two of their three fruit trees were in season: a Fuyu persimmon tree and a guava tree. “Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit.” Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. “Can you believe our luck?” Marx said. “We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit.” Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before. My God, she thought, he is so easy to love. “Shouldn’t you wash that?” Sadie asked. “It’s our tree. Nothing’s touched it except my grimy hand,” Marx said. “What about the birds?” “I don’t fear the birds, Sadie. But you should have one of these.” Marx stood, and he picked another fruit for himself and one for her. He walked over to the hose at the side of the house, and he rinsed the persimmon. He held out the fruit to her. “Eat up, my love. Fuyus only yield every other year.” Sadie took a bite of the fruit. It was mildly sweet, its flesh somewhere between a peach and a cantaloupe. Maybe it was her favorite fruit, too?

Her features were dainty, her small slender wrists climbed up to become the delicate shoulders that beckoned him. Her skin was like peach-tinted cream and he need not have touched her to experience the melting softness of her body. Her perfectly oval face was austere and her manner a little haughty. Her expressions had delicacy as well as a particular strength that did not abate her femininity. It seemed that the world had stopped. Her voice sounded like a melody and she looked like a dream, an illusion, up close and personal.

I just love crazy people like this,' Murphy said. 'Jack Kerouac people. Mad to live, mad to die, that kind of thing.

There was a young lady called Peaches, who simply loved animals to pieces. She ate pigs and sheep, and for cows she would weep, when baked in a sauce of rich greases.

I look and smell,’ Aunt Sponge declared, ‘as lovely as a rose!

Life was more than words. It was laughter and love, faith and joy, and mostly it was the deep peace came from living life fiercely without regret.

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later – because I did not belong there, did not come from there – but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her.

She looks like peaches and cream, like Saturday afternoons down by the frog pond, innocence and the American dream wrapped up in a single startlingly lovely package. It’s a lie, all of it. He believes in exploiting the world for his own gains, but she’d happily ignite the entire thing, if only to roast marshmallows in its embers.

When he reached the desk he handed Caroline a photograph in a dark blue cardboard frame. It was a portrait, black and white, faintly tinted. The woman looking out wore a pale peach sweater. Her hair was gently waved, her eyes a deep shade of blue. Rupert Dean's wife, Emelda, dead now for twenty years. "She was te love of my life," he announced to Caroline, his voice so loud that people looked up.

All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the night before and brushed, wet and scented, across her face. It was wistaria. Wistaria and sunshine . . . she remembered the advertisement. Here indeed were both in profusion. The wistaria was tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet geraniums, bushes of them, and nasturtiums in great heaps, and marigolds so brilliant that they seemed to be burning, and red and pink snapdragons, all outdoing each other in bright, fierce colour. The ground behind these flaming things dropped away in terraces to the sea, each terrace a little orchard, where among the olives grew vines on trellises, and fig-trees, and peach-trees, and cherry-trees. The cherry-trees and peach-trees were in blossom--lovely showers of white and deep rose-colour among the trembling delicacy of the olives; the fig-leaves were just big enough to smell of figs, the vine-buds were only beginning to show. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavender, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea. Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers....

The peach gown she'd chosen was the color of the sunrise, the rippling watered silk seeming to subtly change from rose to pink to nearly orange in different lights. She'd fallen in love with it at once.

Please fut up, Shun,” he interrupted. “Shine, I’ll fut up.” At long last I caught a glimpse of his old smirk. “I thought you wouldn’t poke fun at my peach insteadiment,” he muttered. “But I love peaches.

O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach. There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

The rain had stopped and the sky was absurdly pretty, a single layer of floury cloudlets pinked and peached by the rising sun. Only the juvenile, the mad, and the newly in love noticed. The rest of the city got its head down and ploughed tearily into another day of neurosis.

I wanted to describe to him how the emotional intimacy growing between us was shattering my heart in the most life-affirming ways, but I didn’t have the right words, except to say that I loved him, which wasn’t nearly enough. We spent that night, and every night together after, in a closeness I had never known, or even thought possible with another person. I was happy. Truly content. Drifting to sleep in Bilal’s arms, I thought about the hills beyond the terrace. Soon wild plum, peach, pear, fig, medlar, mulberry, date, and almond trees would bloom.

But inside every sweet peach is a strong pit. And this means she won’t explain the obvious when a man is disrespectful. There is no way to hold your own in a relationship and simultaneously accept rude behavior. A

At such moments—breathless, ransacked by tenderness—I could hardly look at him: I was afraid of showing him too much of my love, which wasn’t only love but also something like a rotten peach eaten alive by its own sweetness.

Renly offered me a peach. At our parley. Mocked me, defied me, threatened me, and offered me a peach. I thought he was drawing a blade and went for mine own. Was that his purpose, to make me show fear? Or was it one of his pointless jests? When he spoke of how sweet the peach was, did his words have some hidden meaning?" The king gave a shake of his head, like a dog shaking a rabbit to snap its neck. "Only Renly could vex me so with a piece of fruit. He brought his doom on himself with his treason, but I did love him, Davos. I know that now. I swear, I will go to my grave thinking of my brother's peach.

She'd assumed she'd be married and have kids by this age, that she would be grooming her own daughter for this, as her friends were doing. She wanted it so much she would dream about it sometimes, and then she would wake up with the skin at her wrists and neck red from the scratchy lace of the wedding gown she'd dreamed of wearing. But she'd never felt anything for the men she'd dated, nothing beyond her own desperation. And her desire to marry wasn't strong enough, would never be strong enough, to allow her to marry a man she didn't love.

My eyes went straight to a soft woman who sat facing the wrong way at the bar top. Soft, because I knew if I were to touch her skin, it would feel like a peach, the kind of woman you could almost smell from inside the building. Instead of facing Andy, she had her back to him, keeping an eye on the door. That must be her. Her hair was exquisite. She was really the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. A golden crown of braids and curls complimented her sun-kissed skin. Her dress draped perfectly over her body, and in that moment, I needed her more than I needed air.

After a few brief simple moments, he found her neck, kissing the nape as if it were a peach, grazing her skin barely, causing her to moan out a small tiny little whimper. Before she could take another rbreath, his lips met hers in rapture, and suddenly, she was lost within the tragic abyss of falling beneath a lovebinding spell.

She had a woman’s swagger at twelve-and-a-half. Hair: strawberry-blonde, and I vaguely recall a daisy in the crook of her ear. She was an inch taller than me, two with the ponytail; smooth cheeks and darling brown eyes that marbled in luscious contrast with her magnolia skin; cream, melting to peach, melting to pink. She beamed like a cherub without the baby fat; a tender neck; pristine lips that would never part for a dirty word. Her body--of no interest to me at the time--was wrapped from neck to toes with home-made footie pajamas, the kind they make for toddlers, but I didn’t laugh; the girl filled that silly one-piece ensemble as if it were couture.

I feel as though I should say something profound, or enact some rite, or trade something to make it official. I want to transfer some trinket which would allow me to say that she's my girl, some kind of currency that proves to people that she likes me back. Something that would permit me to think about her all the time without feeling guilty or helpless or hopelessly far away. I guess I'm just so excited, I want to cage this thing like a tiny red bird so if can't fly away, so it stays the same, so it's still there the next time. For keeps, like a coin in your pocket. Like a peach pit from Mad Jack Lionel's tree. Like scribbled words in a locked suitcase. A bright balloon to tie to your bedpost. And you want to hug it close, hold it, but not so tight it bursts.

Those silly girls had no idea what they were really celebrating. They had no idea what it took to bring Agatha and her friends together seventy-five years ago. The Women's Society Club had been about supporting one another, about banding together to protect one another because no one else would. But it had turned into an ugly beast, a means by which rich ladies would congratulate themselves by giving money to the poor. And Agatha had let it happen. All her life, it seemed, she was making up for things she let happen.

Every time a new house was built, a bucket of peach stones would be found, and even children on their way to school knew that finding one meant luck, whatever the outcome: love forgotten, love gone wrong, love despite all odds, love ever after, love after all this time.

Out from the fire she came in quiet agony to feed on me and claim my spheres of flame. Caitiff! Cruel Stone!

Come to me in love, Love. Come to me in love.

I'm going to make you come, Peaches. And then I'm going to slide my dick in you and make love to you and make you come again.

Her breasts were perfect. Her slender body; those hand-size globes of pale pink flesh. He lowered his head to one and tasted her. Like sugared peaches.

But - love , Mother. Will I love him? The girl wants love , ' Mrs Oortman cried theatrically to the peeling Assendelft walls. 'She wants the peaches and the cream.

If you say you can’t, you can’t. But what if you believe you can?

She blushed, and two more peach flowers blossomed on her cheeks.

There’s no more perfect way to fall asleep than having my arms wrapped around her while I breathe in her peaches and cream scent that is mixed with the scent of us and sweat.

Yet I still clung to a shred of my past, as a flowering peach blossom tree yearning for its fallen bloom.

Loving him came to her the way snow melts into creeks, then rivers, then oceans. Time has engraved him into her heart the way the rivers have carved canyons and glaciers have cut fjords.

Her face was round and rosy, with a healthful downy softness, suggestive of a ripe peach. Her hair, partially silvered by age, was parted smoothly back from a high placed forehead, on which time had written no inscription, except peace on earth, good will to men, and beneath shone a large pair of clear, honest, loving brown eyes; you only needed to look straight into them, to feel that you saw to the bottom of a heart as good and true as ever throbbed in woman's bosom. So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?

You see, at that juncture in my life I wasn’t evolved enough to understand the fluid nature of romantic love (its indifference to human cravings for permanence and certainty); its uncivilized, undomesticated nature (less like a pretty melody than a foxish barking at the moon), or, more importantly perhaps, that it’s a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it’s paradisiacal if she or he loves you back, it’s unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves lucky, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.

During grapes, you hate grapes. During potatoes, you hate potatoes. And during asparagus, you hate asparagus. I suppose that during peaches, you will hate peaches.” Isabel laughed. “No, I love peaches.

We have always heard it preached, „Love one another“. What for? That doctrine was peached, but the explanation is here. Why should I love every one? Because they and I are one. Why should I love my brother? Because he and I are one. There is this oneness; this solidarity of the whole universe. From the lowest worm that crawls under our feet to the highest beings that ever lived – all have various bodies, but are the one Soul.

He was rowed down from the north in a leather skiff manned by a crew of trolls. His fur cape was caked with candle wax, his brow stained blue by wine - though the latter was seldom noticed due to the fox mask he wore at-all times. A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal, handsome, immaculate, searching for sturdier doors to nail his poignant verses on. In Manhattan, grit drifted into his ink bottle. In Vienna, his spice box exploded. On the Greek island of Hydra, Orpheus came to him at dawn astride a transparent donkey and restrung his cheap guitar. From that moment on, he shamelessly and willingly exposed himself to the contagion of music. To the secretly religious curiosity of the traveler was added the openly foolhardy dignity of the troubadour. By the time he returned to America, songs were working in him like bees in an attic. Connoisseurs developed cravings for his nocturnal honey, despite the fact that hearts were occasionally stung. Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium - nailing and screeching at the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side - Leonard Cohen, his vision, his gift, his perseverance, are finally getting their due. It may be because he speaks to this wounded zeitgeist with particular eloquence and accuracy, it may be merely cultural time-lag, another example of the slow-to-catch-on many opening their ears belatedly to what the few have been hearing all along. In any case, the sparkle curtain has shredded, the boogie-woogie gate has rocked loose from its hinges, and here sits L. Cohen at an altar in the garden, solemnly enjoying new-found popularity and expanded respect. From the beginning, his musical peers have recognized Cohen´s ability to establish succinct analogies among life´s realities, his talent for creating intimate relationships between the interior world of longing and language and the exterior world of trains and violins. Even those performers who have neither "covered" his compositions nor been overtly influenced by them have professed to admire their artfulness: the darkly delicious melodies - aural bouquets of gardenia and thistle - that bring to mind an electrified, de-Germanized Kurt Weill; the playfully (and therefore dangerously) mournful lyrics that can peel the apple of love and the peach of lust with a knife that cuts all the way to the mystery, a layer Cole Porter just could`t expose. It is their desire to honor L. Cohen, songwriter, that has prompted a delegation of our brightest artists to climb, one by one, joss sticks smoldering, the steep and salty staircase in the Tower of Song.

This isn't a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naive. That's okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way. A good way to start would be to let fall your notions about "perfect couples." It's really such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out, and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times.

Love ambushed you, it lay in wait, dormant for days or years. It was the red thread, the peach stone, the kiss, the forgiveness. It came after you, it escaped you, it was invisible, it was everything, even to someone at the very end of their life,

What plant?' 'Sorry?' "What plant did Mum leave, at the grave?' Sally went to the open window and reached through to pick a peach-colored flower from a blooming bush. She offered it to Alice. 'Beach hibiscus,' Alice cried softly, remembering the flower crown her mother made when she was a child. Remembering its meaning in the Thornfield Dictionary. Love binds us in eternity.

Hear me well. I cannot begin to list all the things about you that are beautiful- a man could lose himself in your eyes; in your lovely, full lips; in your creamy, perfect skin and the way you blush and turn it the color of an exquisite, ripe peach. And that's without considering your warmth, your intelligence, your humor, and the way I am utterly drawn to you when you enter a room.

What could he say that might make sense to them? Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experience? That was the vital cement, wasn't it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billion-mile-an-hour rid. We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes. Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hot by pies? We taste custard we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul. But... how to say it?

In college, educated women (I found out) were frigid; active women (I knew) were neurotic; women (we all knew) were timid, incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintelligent, obedient, and beautiful. You can always get dressed up and go to a party. Woman is the gateway to another world; Woman is the earth-mother; Woman is the eternal siren; Woman is purity; Woman is carnality; Woman has intuition; Woman is the life-force; Woman is selfless love. "I am the gateway to another world," (said I, looking in the mirror) "I am the earth-mother; I am the eternal siren; I am purity," (Jeez, new pimples) "I am carnality; I have intuition; I am the life-force; I am selfless love." (Somehow it sounds different in the first person, doesn't it?) Honey (said the mirror, scandalised) Are you out of your fucking mind? I AM HONEY I AM RASPBERRY JAM I AM A VERY GOOD LAY I AM A GOOD DATE I AM A GOOD WIFE I AM GOING CRAZY Everything was peaches and cream.

Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he's thinking," Howard will say.)

Members of the court still talked in whispers of the lady-in-waiting who had accidentally worn mismatched stockings to an afternoon tea. They said she made a lovely rosebush, always festooned with stunning flowers in two slightly different colors of peach. Beka didn't aspire to be a rosebush.

If I were a heroine in a fairy tale, I often thought, and a fairy godmother offered to grant me wishes, I would ask for peaches-and-cream skin, eyes like deep blue pools, hair like spun gold instead of blackest ink. I knew I would be worthy of it all. There was nothing I wouldn’t trade for that kind of magic, that kind of beauty. If you were pretty, if you were normal, if you were white, then the good things everyone saw on the outside would match the goodness you knew existed on the inside. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to go to sleep one night and wake up an entirely different person, one who would be loved and welcomed everywhere? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look at your face in the mirror and know you would always belong?

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori Baskets of olives and lemons, Cobbles spattered with wine And the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles With rose-pink fish; Armfuls of dark grapes Heaped on peach-down. On this same square They burned Giordano Bruno. Henchmen kindled the pyre Close-pressed by the mob. Before the flames had died The taverns were full again, Baskets of olives and lemons Again on the vendors' shoulders. I thought of the Campo dei Fiori In Warsaw by the sky-carousel One clear spring evening To the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned The salvos from the ghetto wall, And couples were flying High in the cloudless sky. At times wind from the burning Would drift dark kites along And riders on the carousel Caught petals in midair. That same hot wind Blew open the skirts of the girls And the crowds were laughing On that beautiful Warsaw Sunday. Someone will read as moral That the people of Rome or Warsaw Haggle, laugh, make love As they pass by martyrs' pyres. Someone else will read Of the passing of things human, Of the oblivion Born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only Of the loneliness of the dying, Of how, when Giordano Climbed to his burning There were no words In any human tongue To be left for mankind, Mankind who live on. Already they were back at their wine Or peddled their white starfish, Baskets of olives and lemons They had shouldered to the fair, And he already distanced As if centuries had passed While they paused just a moment For his flying in the fire. Those dying here, the lonely Forgotten by the world, Our tongue becomes for them The language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend And many years have passed, On a great Campo dei Fiori Rage will kindle at a poet's word.

The Blue Fly" Five summer days, five summer nights, The ignorant, loutish, giddy blue-fly Hung without motion on the cling peach Humming occasionally ‘O my love, my fair one!’ As in the canticles. Magnified one thousand times, the insect Looks farcically human; laugh if you will! Bald head, stage fairy wings, blear eyes, A caved-in chest, hairy black mandibles, Long spindly thighs. The crime was detected on the sixth day. What then could be said or done? By anyone? It would have been vindictive, mean, and what-not, To swat that fly for being a blue-fly, For debauch of a peach. Is it fair either, to bring a microscope To bear on the case, even in search of truth? Nature, doubtless, has some compelling cause To glut the carriers of her epidemics - Nor did the peach complain.

To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt. Well, true enough, any word worth repeating is greater than the sum of its parts; and the particular word-part Z can, from a certain perspective, appear anally wired. On those of us neither prosaic nor jaded, however, those whom the Fates have chosen to monitor such things, Z has had an impact above and beyond its signifying function. A presence in its own right, it’s the most distant and elusive of our twenty-six linguistic atoms; a mysterious, dark figure in an otherwise fairly innocuous lineup, and the sleekest little swimmer ever to take laps in a bowl of alphabet soup. Scarcely a day of my life has gone by when I’ve not stirred the alphabetical ant nest, yet every time I type or pen the letter Z, I still feel a secret tingle, a tiny thrill… Z is a whip crack of a letter, a striking viper of a letter, an open jackknife ever ready to cut the cords of convention or peel the peach of lust. A Z is slick, quick, arcane, eccentric, and always faintly sinister - although its very elegance separates it from the brutish X, that character traditionally associated with all forms of extinction. If X wields a tire iron, Z packs a laser gun. Zap! If X is Mike Hammer, Z is James Bond. If X marks the spot, Z avoids the spot, being too fluid, too cosmopolitan, to remain in one place. In contrast to that prim, trim, self-absorbed supermodel, I, or to O, the voluptuous, orgasmic, bighearted slut, were Z a woman, she would be a femme fatale, the consonant we love to fear and fear to love.

Well, I’m definitely wearing a flower crown on my head. I don’t care if you say it’s played out.” Flatly she says, “You can’t wear a flower crown.” “Why not?” She spits out toothpaste. “You’re too old. That’s for flower girls.” “No, you aren’t envisioning it correctly. I wasn’t thinking baby’s breath. I was thinking little pink and peach roses, with a lot of greenery. Pale green greenery, you know that kind?” She shakes her head, resolute. “We aren’t fairies in a forest. It’s too cutesy.

I look at what I know of silence foreknowing all in my descent and wish to know, profoundly how, the light upon your brow has touched me so

Love doesn’t always translate into perfect little speeches. What matters most is what you do.

How can it be possible to be in love with two people equally?  I mean, whoever I choose, I think I'd always be thinking about the other one and knowing how much they'd be hurting.

I need you.” “Peaches…You have me. You always have.

Anastasia was another trap house, but was for pills—Xanax, Ecstasy, Speed, Tylenol one through four with codeine,

She was a damn good kisser, maybe the best I'd ever had the immense pleasure of kissing. It helped that her lips were like pillows and she tasted sweet. Not like strawberries or peaches. Sunshine and sweet—her own brand of it. Plus there was desperation in the kiss, an understated but raw passion I couldn't recall ever experiencing before. Or maybe that had been me. Maybe I'd been the passionate, desperate one. No matter. Either way, she'd stolen my breath, robbed me of thought and sense. She was a master thief, and I loved her for it.

I want to confine your soul by my side," Wuhuan was particularly crazy the night after they got their Daoist couple mark. He kissed the peach blossom mark on the back of Song Qingshi's hand over and over again. He softly whispered the longing in this heart, "Qingshi, don't fall in love with anyone else. Don't be good to anyone else. In this life and the next life and the next life, only me...

beautiful she thought she was. Aunt Sponge had a long-handled mirror on her lap, and she kept picking it up and gazing at her own hideous face. ‘I look and smell,’ Aunt Sponge declared, ‘as lovely as a rose! Just feast your eyes upon my face, observe my shapely nose! Behold my heavenly silky locks! And if I take off both my socks You’ll see my dainty toes.’ ‘But don’t forget,’ Aunt Spiker cried, ‘how much your tummy shows!

Woman" this head like a saucer decorated with everything as lip to lip we hang in mechanical joy; my hands blaze with arias but i think of books on anatomy, and i fall from you as nations burn in anger… to recover from most pitiful error and rebuild, this is it loss and mending until they take us in. the glory of a saturday afternoon like biting into an old peach and you walk across the room heavy with everything except my love.

I feel weird. Too much bacon. Everything’s jumping around inside me.” Mitchell fixed me with a serious stare. “Peaches. That fluttering is love, not bacon.” “Are you sure? It feels like bacon. Does love feel like bacon?

Wild Peaches" When the world turns completely upside down You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore; We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color. Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor, We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown. The winter will be short, the summer long, The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong; All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all. The squirrels in their silver fur will fall Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot. 2 The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold. The misted early mornings will be cold; The little puddles will be roofed with glass. The sun, which burns from copper into brass, Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass. Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover; A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year; The spring begins before the winter’s over. By February you may find the skins Of garter snakes and water moccasins Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear. 3 When April pours the colors of a shell Upon the hills, when every little creek Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell, When strawberries go begging, and the sleek Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak, We shall live well — we shall live very well. The months between the cherries and the peaches Are brimming cornucopias which spill Fruits red and purple, sombre-bloomed and black; Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback. 4 Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones There’s something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There’s something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones. I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray, Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves; That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath, Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach.

We should consider ourselves lucky, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.

Nearby, at the edge of a newly planted peach orchard, the karpos Peaches stood in all his diapered glory. (Oh, sure. She showed up after the danger had passed.) He was engaged in a heated conversation with a young female karpos whom I assumed was a native of the area. She looked much like Peaches himself, except she was covered in a fine layer of spines. 'Peaches,' Peaches told her. 'Prickly Pear!' the young lady rejoined. 'Peaches!' "Prickly Pear!' That seemed to be the extent of their argument. Perhaps it was about to devolve into a death match for local fruit supremacy. Or perhaps it was the beginning of the greatest love story ever to ripen. It was hard to tell with karpoi.

It didn’t matter where you put your unconditional love, once given, the stealing away of it was an assault to every sense. Smells were the worst—they could ambush you, put you smack back in the middle of the hottest part of the grief. The scent of a peaches-and-cream candle. The brand of deodorant she’d used. Her pillow back home. The smell of the bookstore in the evening, when I’d believed Barrons was dead. When you love too hard, you can lose the will to live without them. Everywhere you look is a great big sucking absence of what you once had and will never have again. And life gets weirdly flat and too sharp and painful at the same time, and nothing feels right and everything cuts.

A picnic basket in Paris is like a treasure chest- untold riches in a limited space. The first apricots had appeared at the market, their skins fading from speckled red to glowing orange to burnished gold, like the sun-bleached walls of an Italian villa. There were tiny cucumbers, as thick as my thumb and curled like a ribbon. I'd become obsessed with a new fruit called a pêche plat, a flat peach. Imagine a perfectly ripe white peach that someone has sat on. Gwendal picked up a tomato and bit into it like an apple. I did the same. At the bottom of the basket was a carefully folded square of waxed paper. Inside was a small mound of rillettes, shredded pork cooked in its own fat until meltingly smooth.

Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls. The eye is Love's own magic glass, where all things that are not of earth, glide in supernatural light. There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers' eyes. In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye-fish with wings, that sometimes leap out, instinct with joy; moist fish-wings wet the lover's cheek. Love's eyes are holy things; therein the mysteries of life are lodged; looking in each other's eyes, lovers see the ultimate secret of the worlds; and with thrills eternally untranslatable, feel that Love is god of all. Man or woman who has never loved, nor once looked deep down into their own lover's eyes, they know not the sweetest and the loftiest religion of this earth. Love is both Creator's and Saviour's gospel to mankind; a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies.

Only this: if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is—excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it’d be better for his health.

The Spring and the Fall In the spring of the year, in the spring of the year, I walked the road beside my dear. The trees were black where the bark was wet. I see them yet, in the spring of the year. He broke me a bough of the blossoming peach That was out of the way and hard to reach. In the fall of the year, in the fall of the year, I walked the road beside my dear. The rooks went up with a raucous trill. I hear them still, in the fall of the year. He laughed at all I dared to praise, And broke my heart, in little ways. Year be springing or year be falling, The bark will drip and the birds be calling. There’s much that’s fine to see and hear In the spring of a year, in the fall of a year. 'Tis not love’s going hurts my days, But that it went in little ways.

He couldn't help but lose himself in Rain's eyes. They were deep vine green, so vivid; the perfect match to her peach cheeks. Malcolm had been trying to run from those eyes, but hadn't realized until now that for the last two years he'd been living in a jungle of the exact same shade.

BOWLS OF FOOD Moon and evening star do their slow tambourine dance to praise this universe. The purpose of every gathering is discovered: to recognize beauty and love what’s beautiful. “Once it was like that, now it’s like this,” the saying goes around town, and serious consequences too. Men and women turn their faces to the wall in grief. They lose appetite. Then they start eating the fire of pleasure, as camels chew pungent grass for the sake of their souls. Winter blocks the road. Flowers are taken prisoner underground. Then green justice tenders a spear. Go outside to the orchard. These visitors came a long way, past all the houses of the zodiac, learning Something new at each stop. And they’re here for such a short time, sitting at these tables set on the prow of the wind. Bowls of food are brought out as answers, but still no one knows the answer. Food for the soul stays secret. Body food gets put out in the open like us. Those who work at a bakery don’t know the taste of bread like the hungry beggars do. Because the beloved wants to know, unseen things become manifest. Hiding is the hidden purpose of creation: bury your seed and wait. After you die, All the thoughts you had will throng around like children. The heart is the secret inside the secret. Call the secret language, and never be sure what you conceal. It’s unsure people who get the blessing. Climbing cypress, opening rose, Nightingale song, fruit, these are inside the chill November wind. They are its secret. We climb and fall so often. Plants have an inner Being, and separate ways of talking and feeling. An ear of corn bends in thought. Tulip, so embarrassed. Pink rose deciding to open a competing store. A bunch of grapes sits with its feet stuck out. Narcissus gossiping about iris. Willow, what do you learn from running water? Humility. Red apple, what has the Friend taught you? To be sour. Peach tree, why so low? To let you reach. Look at the poplar, tall but without fruit or flower. Yes, if I had those, I’d be self-absorbed like you. I gave up self to watch the enlightened ones. Pomegranate questions quince, Why so pale? For the pearl you hid inside me. How did you discover my secret? Your laugh. The core of the seen and unseen universes smiles, but remember, smiles come best from those who weep. Lightning, then the rain-laughter. Dark earth receives that clear and grows a trunk. Melon and cucumber come dragging along on pilgrimage. You have to be to be blessed! Pumpkin begins climbing a rope! Where did he learn that? Grass, thorns, a hundred thousand ants and snakes, everything is looking for food. Don’t you hear the noise? Every herb cures some illness. Camels delight to eat thorns. We prefer the inside of a walnut, not the shell. The inside of an egg, the outside of a date. What about your inside and outside? The same way a branch draws water up many feet, God is pulling your soul along. Wind carries pollen from blossom to ground. Wings and Arabian stallions gallop toward the warmth of spring. They visit; they sing and tell what they think they know: so-and-so will travel to such-and-such. The hoopoe carries a letter to Solomon. The wise stork says lek-lek. Please translate. It’s time to go to the high plain, to leave the winter house. Be your own watchman as birds are. Let the remembering beads encircle you. I make promises to myself and break them. Words are coins: the vein of ore and the mine shaft, what they speak of. Now consider the sun. It’s neither oriental nor occidental. Only the soul knows what love is. This moment in time and space is an eggshell with an embryo crumpled inside, soaked in belief-yolk, under the wing of grace, until it breaks free of mind to become the song of an actual bird, and God.

Wedding Superstitions The Bridal Gown White - You have chosen right. Grey - You'll go far away. Black - You'll wish yourself back. Red - You'll wish yourself dead. Green - Ashamed to be seen. Blue - You'll always be true. Pearl - You'll live in a whirl. Peach - A love out of reach. Yellow - Ashamed of your fellow. Pink - Your Spirits will sink. The Wedding Day Monday for health, Tuesday for wealth, Wednesday best of all, Thursday for losses, Friday for crosses, Saturday for no luck at all. The Wedding Month Marry in May, and you'll rue the day, Marry in Lent, you'll live to repent. Married when the year is new, He'll be loving, kind and true. When February birds do mate, You wed nor dread your fate. If you wed when March winds blow, Joy and sorrow both you'll know. Marry in April when you can, Joy for maiden and the man. Marry in the month of May, And you'll surely rue the day. Marry when the June roses grow, Over land and sea you'll go. Those who in July do wed, Must labour for their daily bread. Whoever wed in August be, Many a change is sure to see. Marry in September's shine, Your living will be rich and fine. If in October you do marry, Love will come, but riches tarry. If you wed in bleak November, Only joys will come, remember, When December's snows fall fast, Marry and true love will last. Married in January's roar and rime, Widowed you'll be before your prime. Married in February's sleepy weather, Life you'll tread in time together. Married when March winds shrill and roar, Your home will lie on a distant shore. Married 'neath April's changeful skies, A checkered path before you lies. Married when bees o'er May blossoms flit, Strangers around your board will sit. Married in month of roses June, Life will be one long honeymoon. Married in July with flowers ablaze, Bitter-sweet memories in after days. Married in August's heat and drowse, Lover and friend in your chosen spouse. Married in September's golden glow, Smooth and serene your life will go. Married when leaves in October thin, Toil and hardships for you begin. Married in veils of November mist, Fortune your wedding ring has kissed. Married in days of December's cheer, Love's star shines brighter from year to year

The essential mark of maturity in Christians—as in peach trees—is generativity. Mature faith bears fruit. Mature Christians are branches on which God’s love is multiplied and offered for the nourishment of others. As Jesus pointed out, “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples” (John 15:8). By nurturing and offering the life-giving fruits of the Spirit (e.g., love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control [Gal. 5:22–23]), we become branches of divine grace, vehicles Christ uses to extend himself to others.

Now, my all-time favorite accolade from a book reviewer was when Fernanda Pivano, Italy’s best-known critic, wrote in a leading Italian newspaper that “Tom Robbins is the most dangerous writer in the world.” I never read my reviews, even in English, but others sometimes pass choice bits along, so when I had occasion to meet the legendary Signora Pivano at a reception in Milan, I asked her what she meant by that wonderfully flattering remark. She replied, “Because you are saying zat love is zee only thing that matters and everything else eese a beeg joke.” Well, being uncertain, frankly, that is what I’d been saying, I changed the subject and inquired about her recent public denial that she’d ever gone to bed with Ernest Hemingway, whom she’d shown around Italy in the thirties. “Why didn’t you sleep with Hemingway?” I inquired. Signora Pivano sighed, closed her large brown eyes, shook her gray head, and answered in slow, heavily accented English, “I was a fool.” Okay, back to the New York Cinematheque. Why did I choose to go watch a bunch of jerky, esoteric, often self-indulgent 16mm movies rather than sleep with the sexy British actress? Move over, Fernanda, there’s room for two fools on your bus.

They lost their sense of reality, the notion of time, the rhythm of daily habits. They closed the doors and windows again so as not to waste time getting undressed and they walked about the house as Remedios the Beauty had wanted to do and they would roll around naked in the mud of the courtyard, and one afternoon they almost drowned as they made love in the cistern. In a short time they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and they disemboweled the mattresses and emptied them on the floor as they suffocated in storms of cotton. Although Aureliano was just as ferocious a lover as his rival, it was Amaranta ?rsula who ruled in that paradise of disaster with her mad genius and her lyrical voracity, as if she had concentrated in her love the unconquerable energy that her great-great-grandmother had given to the making of little candy animals. And yet, while she was singing with pleasure and dying with laughter over her own inventions, Aureliano was becoming more and more absorbed and silent, for his passion was self-centered and burning. Nevertheless, they both reached such extremes of virtuosity that when they became exhausted from excitement, they would take advantage of their fatigue. They would give themselves over to the worship of their bodies, discovering that the rest periods of love had unexplored possibilities, much richer than those of desire. While he would rub Amaranta ?rsula’s erect breasts with egg whites or smooth her elastic thighs and peach-like stomach with cocoa butter, she would play with Aureliano’s portentous creature as if it were a doll and would paint clown’s eyes on it with her lipstick and give it a Turk’s mustache with her eyebrow pencil, and would put on organza bow ties and little tinfoil hats. One night they daubed themselves from head to toe with peach jam and licked each other like dogs and made mad love on the floor of the porch, and they were awakened by a torrent of carnivorous ants who were ready to eat them alive.

It's good that I'm excellent at subterfuge. Under my bed, there is half a bottle of peach schnapps and a handful of romance novels (impoverished duke plus lower class heiress equals true love forever). Mom doesn't know any of this. Acting casual is key---just a girl going about her business, nothing to see here.

Elegy on Toy Piano" For Kenneth Koch You don't need a pony to connect you to the unseeable or an airplane to connect you to the sky. Necessary it is to love to live and there are many manuals but in all important ways one is on one's own. You need not cut off your hand. No need to eat a bouquet. Your head becomes a peach pit. Your tongue a honeycomb. Necessary it is to live to love, to charge into the burning tower then charge back out and necessary it is to die. Even for the trees, even for the pony connecting you to what can't be grasped. The injured gazelle falls behind the herd. One last wild enjambment. Because of the sores in his mouth, the great poet struggles with a dumpling. His work has enlarged the world but the world is about to stop including him. He is the tower the world runs out of. When something becomes ash, there's nothing you can do to turn it back. About this, even diamonds do not lie.

The Haight was awash in Christian charity. These kids, simultaneously jubilant and introspective, were practicing what their elders preached. The Haight was the New Testament: animated, activated, brought to life in living color. The naïveté was so thick you could cut it with a Popsicle stick -- but so apparently was Christ’s. Years later, on a wild African savannah a hundred miles from even the crudest settlement, a pride of lions on one horizon, a solitary giraffe on another, I said to myself, “This is the way the world was meant to be and everything else is a mistake.” I’d thought the exact same thing in San Francisco during the Summer of Love.

PAXTON OSGOOD'S FUTURE HUSBAND Will be kind Will be funny Will be accepting Will be be able to cook Will be a good kisser Will always surprise me Will argue with me and sometimes let me win, but not always Will be mysterious Will always love me, no matter what I look like Mama will not like him, which means I will love him even more

But what about you, Miss Spider?’ asked James. ‘Aren’t you also much loved in the world?’ ‘Alas, no,’ Miss Spider answered, sighing long and loud. ‘I am not loved at all. And yet I do nothing but good. All day long I catch flies and mosquitoes in my webs. I am a decent person.’ ‘I know you are,’ said James. ‘It is very unfair the way we Spiders are treated,’ Miss Spider went on. ‘Why, only last week your own horrible Aunt Sponge flushed my poor dear father down the plug-hole in the bathtub.’ ‘Oh, how awful!’ cried James. ‘I watched the whole thing from a corner up in the ceiling,’ Miss Spider murmured. ‘It was ghastly. We never saw him again.’ A large tear rolled down her cheek and fell with a splash on the floor.

From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road where we turned toward signs painted Peaches. From laden boughs, from hands, from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar of the roadside, succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat. O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach. There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing, from blossoms to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

There is no reason to deprive your body of love, beauty, creativity, and inspiration, Chopra said. I wrote out a collection of sensory memories from childhood, recalling how it felt to be nourished and soothed. Rice steaming, rain outside. Standing in a towel heated by the tall furnace, feet dripping on the hardwood floor. The smell of sun on asphalt. Cold water on my face in the morning. Eating a bowl of cereal at midnight. The sound of a page turning as I am being read to. The thud of a peach falling. The dusty smell of sand. The scorch of cocoa, the sticky film of melted marshmallow. Spongy insides of bread sopping up tomatoes and vodka sauce. I am reminded of what I am capable of feeling. The ways I consume, my senses opening to receive, at ease, indulgent.

How Robin would have loved this!’ the aunts used to say fondly. 'How Robin would have laughed!’ In truth, Robin had been a giddy, fickle child - somber at odd moments, practically hysterical at others - and in life, this unpredictability had been a great part of his charm. But his younger sisters, who had never in any proper sense known him at all, nonetheless grew up certain of their dead brother’s favorite color (red); his favorite book (The Wind in the Willows) and his favorite character in it (Mr. Today); his favorite flavor of ice cream (chocolate) and his favorite baseball team (the Cardinals) and a thousand other things which they - being living children, and preferring chocolate ice cream one week and peach the next - were not even sure they knew about themselves. Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin’s part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.

Romantic love is ambulatory by nature, and it must be anchored in strata more stable than lust if it’s to last. Marital disintegration is accelerated when only one, or neither, party is grounded and growing, or growing at different rates or in different directions. As I became increasingly interested in cultural matters, matters of the mind and spirit, my teenage bride waxed more and more materialistic.

Yeah, ignore me." Aaro pawed through the bags until he found one with stenciled hearts on it. "By the way, you never did tell me your size. Hope nothing binds or pinches your tender pink places, babe." He let the bag fly. It landed on Lily's lap. She shrank back as if it were a venomous snake. Fuck-me-please panties spilled out. A tangle of satin, lace and silk. Red, black, peach, flesh-tone. Bruno growled expletives in a Calabrese dialect as he shoved underwear into the bag. It was his standard tension reliever. None of the people he insulted knew he was commenting on their grandmother's predilection for sex with sheep. "I am not wearing that slutty, disgusting stuff." Lily's voice was haughty. "Certainly not after you're pawed it. Dog." "Arf, arf." Aaro's tone was more cheerful than it had been so far any time this morning. "I love it when she spits bile.

years, my family had sold the estate around the house, piece by piece, so that the sprawling peach orchard and even the grand front drive had given way to tidy bungalows lining the long road to the main house. Grandma had said it made gossip travel even faster, the way they built houses so close together these days. I always told her that the good citizens of Sugarland, Tennessee, needed no help. Still, I loved the place. And I absolutely despised letting

I will always be the other woman. I disappear for a time like the moon in daylight, then rise at night all mother-of-pearl so that a man’s upturned face, watching, will have reflected on it the milk of longing. And though he may leave, memory will perfect me. One day the light may fall in a certain way on Penelope’s hair, and he will pause wildly… but when she turns, it will only be his wife, to whom white sheets simply mean laundry— even Nausikaä in her silly braids thought more washing linen than of him, preferring Odysseus clean and oiled to that briny, unkempt lion I would choose. Let Dido and her kind leap from cliffs for love. My men will moan and dream of me for years… desire and need become the same animal in the silken dark. To be the other woman is to be a season that is always about to end, when the air is flowered with jasmine and peach, and the weather day after day is flawless, and the forecast is hurricane.

One of his great pleasures is overdoing it with the groceries, involving several stops at little markets, cheese shops, the East Haven lady who makes her own Thai BBQ sauce and fries up a bag of plantains for him while he waits. At our old house, we had a refrigerator just for condiments. Even now, my older daughter always says, How can you be only two people and never have an empty fridge? That’s Brian, I say, buyer of burrata, soppressata, Meyer lemons, white peaches, Benton’s ham.

His laptop makes a strange wheezing noise, and the screen appears with a picture of a Saint Bernard. It's a close-up of the dog's droopy face, a thin line of drool hanging from its left jowl. "That's Momo-chan," he says. Momo means peach in Japanese. "She is the love of my life." I swivel my laptop toward him, showing him my screen. It's a photograph of Tamagotchi. His teeth are bared, and the picture is a little dark---flashing lights give him seizures. "Tamagotchi. The love of my life.

As a child I had loved the legend of the cowherd and the spinning girl. They were so in love that they neglected their work and so the God of Heaven placed them in the sky as constellations, separated by the Silver River of Heaven—the Milky Way. Once a year, on the seventh evening of the seventh month, a flock of magpies, taking pity on the lovesick couple, fly to the sky and form a bridge so that they can meet. On this night all over China, women make offerings to these stars, hoping for love.

A LITTLE GIRL, my skin was pale, my hair blonde, and my face full of freckles. While I may have looked like Laura Ingalls Wilder, that’s not how I felt. I loved drawing pictures of myself when I was young, and whenever it came time to shade in the skin, I usually picked a brown crayon rather than a peach one. Peach simply didn’t resonate with me. I felt like brown suited me better and was prettier. I could see that my skin was light, but my perception of myself wasn’t limited to what my eyes could take in.

I travel your body, like the world, your belly is a plaza full of sun, your breasts two churches where blood performs its own, parallel rites, my glances cover you like ivy, you are a city the sea assaults, a stretch of ramparts split by the light in two halves the color of peaches, a domain of salt, rocks and birds, under the rule of oblivious noon, dressed in the color of my desires, you go your way naked as my thoughts, I travel your eyes, like the sea, tigers drink their dreams in those eyes, the hummingbird burns in those flames, I travel your forehead, like the moon, like the cloud that passes through your thoughts, I travel your belly, like your dreams, your skirt of corn ripples and sings, your skirt of crystal, your skirt of water, your lips, your hair, your glances rain all through the night, and all day long you open my chest with your fingers of water, you close my eyes with your mouth of water, you rain on my bones, a tree of liquid sending roots of water into my chest

My love, whose fingers are matches, whose waist is encircled by the arms of the wind. My love, how the world sleeps in your throat, how your heart is filled with the scents of raspberries and grapes, to live inside you, to live inside the warm peach. Otherwise there is no way to stop despair from lurking all night in the shadows beside the old toll gate. Otherwise we will have to weep in another language. It was on a country road. It was in the wrong tense. How do we stop all our words from falling in love with gravity? Otherwise we will have to stop taking breaths from this moment on. From this moment on the abandoned clocks will observe us. My love, our hearts are growing full of broken wings, My love, to find our voice in a drop of water, in the tracks the starlight leaves behind. If only this were enough. If only we could get the attention of Time, standing in that doorway, peeling an apple. It hurts here. It hurts here. — Richard Jackson, from “The Italian Phrase Book,” Richard Jackson Greatest Hits: 1980-2004 (Pudding House Publications, 2004)

Ode, Elegy, Aubade, Pslam" 1 The songbird that escapes from a burning house will build its nest in the shape of a cage. 2 This is one thing we know: song begs for the places that make it grow from seed to starling, 3 places that put the heart’s hemlock in an empty rowboat and heave it from the shore. 4 We only praise what we cannot keep: violin strings berried with rain, teacups overflowing with brandywine, radios sickened with static. 5 Glass tossed out with the tide will come back smoother and stranger, but never to the same person. 6 This is something we want to know. The woman in love never touches her ears. 7 The man in his house is always lost without her. 8 Morning pulls light from the dark like a boy hoisting a trout from the lake by its clean, pink gills. 9 When the woman escapes from a burning house she will know the path of the wind, 10 how it writes its scripture in peach blossoms blown into a baby’s empty pram. 11 She’ll feel it compose its words against her body, against the night, against the water, in an endless, artless psalm.

He spooned the zabaglione into ramekins and slid them into the fridge. They were to form part of a complex assemblage of warm and cold, consisting of a fresh peach gelato, just starting to thaw; then zabaglione made with Barolo wine, slightly chilled; then a warm froth of more zabaglione, a thicker one this time, made with the yolks of goose eggs and rich, sherry like marsala; and finally a topping of crisp fried mint leaves and freshly roasted espresso beans, arranged like the petals and seeds of a flower on top of the other ingredients.

The touch of his hands on her skin seeped into her pores like water. It was as if there was a place inside her that no one had reached before, and it had been shaken awake by this man’s warm embrace. She had never felt such yearning for another person’s body – it was beyond the flesh and the consciousness, it was not merely lust, neither was it love. Perhaps the best way to describe it, she thought, was like being a lone traveller in a desert, exhausted and desolate, when the most beautiful and fruitful peach tree blossomed in front of her.

Onions! Fresh, hot, sweet onions,” Sam called as Mary Lou pulled the cart down Main Street. “Eight cents a dozen.” It was a beautiful spring morning. The sky was painted pale blue and pink—the same color as the lake and the peach trees along its shore. Mrs. Gladys Tennyson was wearing just her nightgown and robe as she came running down the street after Sam. Mrs. Tennyson was normally a very proper woman who never went out in public without dressing up in fine clothes and a hat. So it was quite surprising to the people of Green Lake to see her running past them. “Sam!” she shouted. “Whoa, Mary Lou,” said Sam, stopping his mule and cart. “G’morning, Mrs. Tennyson,” he said. “How’s little Becca doing?” Gladys Tennyson was all smiles. “I think she’s going to be all right. The fever broke about an hour ago. Thanks to you.” “I’m sure the good Lord and Doc Hawthorn deserve most of the credit.” “The Good Lord, yes,” agreed Mrs. Tennyson, “but not Dr. Hawthorn. That quack wanted to put leeches on her stomach! Leeches! My word! He said they would suck out the bad blood. Now you tell me. How would a leech know good blood from bad blood?” “I wouldn’t know,” said Sam. “It was your onion tonic,” said Mrs. Tennyson. “That’s what saved her.” Other townspeople made their way to the cart. “Good morning, Gladys,” said Hattie Parker. “Don’t you look lovely this morning.” Several people snickered. “Good morning, Hattie,” Mrs. Tennyson replied. “Does your husband know you’re parading about in your bed clothes?” Hattie asked. There were more snickers. “My husband knows exactly where I am and how I am dressed, thank you,” said Mrs. Tennyson. “We have both been up all night and half the morning with Rebecca. She almost died from stomach sickness. It seems she ate some bad meat.” Hattie’s face flushed. Her husband, Jim Parker, was the butcher. “It made my husband and me sick as well,” said Mrs. Tennyson, “but it nearly killed Becca, what with her being so young. Sam saved her life.” “It wasn’t me,” said Sam. “It was the onions.” “I’m glad Becca’s all right,” Hattie said contritely. “I keep telling Jim he needs to wash his knives,” said Mr. Pike, who owned the general store. Hattie Parker excused herself, then turned and quickly walked away. “Tell Becca that when she feels up to it to come by the store for a piece of candy,” said Mr. Pike. “Thank you, I’ll do that.” Before returning home, Mrs. Tennyson bought a dozen onions from Sam. She gave him a dime and told him to keep the change. “I don’t take charity,” Sam told her. “But if you want to buy a few extra onions for Mary Lou, I’m sure she’d appreciate it.” “All right then,” said Mrs. Tennyson, “give me my change in onions.” Sam gave Mrs. Tennyson an additional three onions, and she fed them one at a time to Mary Lou. She laughed as the old donkey ate them out of her hand.

Call it magic, call it a deep connection to the earth. It can be labeled many things, but the fact is that every woman in the Stevens line has had some special ability. Your great-grandmother, my grandma Emma, could bake pies that inspired people to tell the truth. One bite of her apple streusel crumb pie and a man would confess to an affair. A forkful of her peach cobbler and feuding siblings would apologize for their mistakes and make up. I'm told her cherry pie was especially popular for making shy beaus finally declare their true love and propose to their sweethearts.

It’s the cemetery where my father is already buried. “Great,” I say. “Just make sure you leave your forwarding address.” I hold the keypad away from my ear and punch the pound button. “Got another call coming in,” I lie. “At this hour?” “It’s an escort service,” I joke. “I don’t like to keep Peaches waiting . . .” “You’re going to be the death of me, Leo,” my mother says with a sigh. “Sons of Abraham Cemetery. Got it,” I say. “I love you, Ma.” “I loved you first,” she replies. “So what am I supposed to tell my podiatrist about Irene?” “If she keeps wearing heels she’ll wind

For me, what a single firefly can do is this: it can light a memory I thought was long lost in roadsides overrun with Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod, a peach pie cooling in the window of a distant house. It might make me feel like I’m traveling again to a gathering of loved ones dining seaside on a Greek island, listening to cicada song and a light wind rustling the mimosa trees. A single firefly might be the spark that sends us back to our grandmother’s backyard to listen for whip-poor-wills; the spark that sends us back to splashing in an ice-cold creek bed, with our jeans rolled up to our knees, until we shudder and gasp, our toes fully wrinkled. In that spark is a slowdown and tenderness. Listen: Boom. Can you hear that? The cassowary is trying to tell us something. Boom. Did you see that? A single firefly is, too. Such a tiny light, for such a considerable task. Its luminescence could very well be the spark that reminds us to make a most necessary turn- a shift and a swing and a switch- toward cherishing this magnificent and wondrous planet. Boom. Boom. You might think of a heartbeat- your own. A child’s. Someone else’s. Or some thing’s heart. And in that slowdown, you might think it’s a kind of love. And you’d be right.

How easy she is with her affection for him, how sure she is of its reach, its life, its return, because he touches her, too. She squints and laughs when his hand finds her; her sallow cheek shines with the peach shimmer of the underside of a bird’s wing. Safi touched me just so when she kissed me, making a birdcage of her fingers, a careful enclosure of my visage. How I loved being her kept bird, clipped and settled: I preened for her, leaned into her, heart fluttering. How I wanted what this woman has: to touch Safi in the light of day, outside the nest of trees, the buzz of the hive. To be safe in love—but I could not.

get away. “I love you, Michael Howard. I know you can already feel it, but I need to say it.” She tugged at his lips and he returned the favor. She tasted of peaches and cream. He wanted to kiss her cheek. Her chin. Her neck. Her chest. Every inch of her. Every dimple. Every hidden place he’d always wanted to explore. His tongue charged into her mouth. She opened to him, sliding hers across his, tasting it. Curling around it. Nipping at it. He wanted to take it slow, but his body betrayed him. He pressed into her, his hands squeezing at her hips. Now that he had a taste of her, he wanted all of her. Something crashed inside the Morgan house.

But it wasn't all bad. Sometimes things wasn't all bad. He used to come home easing into bed sometimes, not too drunk. I make out like I'm asleep, 'casue it's late, and he taken three dollars out of my pocketbook that morning or something. I hear him breathing, but I don't look around. I can see in my mind's eye his black arms thrown back behind his head, the muscles like a great big peach stones sanded down, with veins running like little swollen rivers down his arms. Without touching him I be feeling those ridges on the tips of my fingers. I sees the palms of his hands calloused to granite, and the long fingers curled up and still. I think about the thick, knotty hair on his chest, and the two big swells his breast muscles make. I want to rub my face hard in his chest and feel the hair cut my skin. I know just where the hair growth slacks out-just above his navel- and how it picks up again and spreads out. Maybe he'll shift a little, and his leg will touch me, or I feel his flank just graze my behind. I don't move even yet. Then he lift his head, turn over, and put his hand on my waist. If I don't move, he'll move his hand over to pull and knead my stomach. Soft and slow-like. I still don't move, because I don't want him to stop. I want to pretend sleep and have him keep rubbing my stomach. Then he will lean his head down and bite my tit. Then I don't want him to rub my stomach anymore. I want him to put his hand between my legs. I pretend to wake up, and turn to him, but not opening my legs. I want him to open them for me. He does, and I be soft and wet where his fingers are strong and hard. I be softer than I ever been before. All my strength in his hand. My brain curls up like wilted leaves. A funny, empty feeling is in my hands. I want to grab holt of something, so I hold his head. His mouth is under my chin. Then I don't want his hands between my legs no more, because I think I am softening away. I stretch my legs open, and he is on top of me. Too heavy to hold, too light not to. He puts his thing in me. In me. In me. I wrap my feet around his back so he can't get away. His face is next to mine. The bed springs sounds like them crickets used to back home. He puts his fingers in mine, and we stretches our arms outwise like Jesus on the cross. I hold tight. My fingers and my feet hold on tight, because everything else is going, going. I know he wants me to come first. But I can't. Not until he does. Not until I feel him loving me. Just me. Sinking into me. Not until I know that my flesh is all that be on his mind. That he couldnt stop if he had to. That he would die rather than take his thing our of me. Of me. Not until he has let go of all he has, and give it to me. To me. To me. When he does, I feel a power. I be strong, I be pretty, I be young. And then I wait. He shivers and tosses his head. Now I be strong enough, pretty enough, and young enough to let him make me come. I take my fingers out of his and put my hands on his behind. My legs drop back onto the bed. I don't make a noise, because the chil'ren might hear. I begin to feel those little bits of color floating up into me-deep in me. That streak of green from the june-bug light, the purple from the berries trickling along my thighs, Mama's lemonade yellow runs sweet in me. Then I feel like I'm laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up with the colors, and I'm afraid I'll come, and afraid I won't. But I know I will. And I do. And it be rainbow all inside. And it lasts ad lasts and lasts. I want to thank him, but dont know how, so I pat him like you do a baby. He asks me if I'm all right. I say yes. He gets off me and lies down to sleep. I want to say something, but I don't. I don't want to take my mind offen the rainbow. I should get up and go to the toilet, but I don't. Besides Cholly is asleep with his leg thrown over me. I can't move and I don't want to.

I discovered that I think God is a more generous savior than some would want us to believe. Ultimately, none of us can truly know how we'll be judged. And any mere human who thinks their judgement is somehow mightier than another's, well, they're in the wrong... Is it a sin? I can't answer that with a yes or a no. I'm not the one deciding. There are certainly people in the world making dreadful choices who love people of the opposite sex. Are you a beautiful person who is kind and true and dear and deserving of faith and justice just like the rest of us? Absolutely. I don't think God would have put you here only to torment you... So my short answer is, don't worry about it. You're perfect as you are.

Kami Castillo My Books Browse ▾ Community ▾ All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the night before and brushed, wet and scented, across her face. It was wistaria. Wistaria and sunshine . . . she remembered the advertisement. Here indeed were both in profusion. The wistaria was tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet geraniums, bushes of them, and nasturtiums in great heaps, and marigolds so brilliant that they seemed to be burning, and red and pink snapdragons, all outdoing each other in bright, fierce colour. The ground behind these flaming things dropped away in terraces to the sea, each terrace a little orchard, where among the olives grew vines on trellises, and fig-trees, and peach-trees, and cherry-trees. The cherry-trees and peach-trees were in blossom--lovely showers of white and deep rose-colour among the trembling delicacy of the olives; the fig-leaves were just big enough to smell of figs, the vine-buds were only beginning to show. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavender, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea. Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers....

If I were a heroine in a fairy tale, I often thought, and a fairy godmother offered to grant me wishes, I would ask for peaches-and-cream skin, eyes like deep blue pools, hair like spun gold instead of blackest ink. I knew that I would be worthy of it all. There was nothing I wouldn't trade for that kind of magic, that kind of beauty. If you were pretty, if you were normal, if you were white, then the good things everyone saw on the outside would match the goodness you kenw existed on the inside. And wouldn't it be wonderful to go to sleep one night and wake up an entirely different person, one who would be loved and welcomed everywhere? Wouldn't it be wonderful to look at your face in the mirror and know you would always belong?

I go to one of my favorite Instagram profiles, the.korean.vegan, and I watch her last video, in which she makes peach-topped tteok. The Korean vegan, Joanne, cooks while talking about various things in her life. As she splits open a peach, she explains why she gave up meat. As she adds lemon juice, brown sugar, nutmeg, a pinch of salt, cinnamon, almond extract, maple syrup, then vegan butter and vegan milk and sifted almond and rice flour, she talks about how she worried about whitewashing her diet, about denying herself a fundamental part of her culture, and then about how others don't see her as authentically Korean since she is a vegan. I watch other videos by Joanne, soothed by her voice into feeling human myself, and into craving the experiences of love she talks of and the food she cooks as she does. I go to another profile, and watch a person's hands delicately handle little knots of shirataki noodles and wash them in cold water, before placing them in a clear oden soup that is already filled with stock-boiled eggs, daikon, and pure white triangles of hanpen. Next, they place a cube of rice cake in a little deep-fried tofu pouch, and seal the pouch with a toothpick so it looks like a tiny drawstring bag; they place the bag in with the other ingredients. "Every winter my mum made this dish for me," a voice says over the video, "just like how every winter my grandma made it for my mum when she was a child." The person in the video is half Japanese like me, and her name is Mei; she appears on the screen, rosy cheeked, chopsticks in her hand, and sits down with her dish and eats it, facing the camera. Food means so much in Japan. Soya beans thrown out of temples in February to tempt out demons before the coming of spring bring the eater prosperity and luck; sushi rolls eaten facing a specific direction decided each year bring luck and fortune to the eater; soba noodles consumed at New Year help time progress, connecting one year to the next; when the noodles snap, the eater can move on from bad events from the last year. In China too, long noodles consumed at New Year grant the eater a long life. In Korea, when rice-cake soup is eaten at New Year, every Korean ages a year, together, in unison. All these things feel crucial to East Asian identity, no matter which country you are from.

As I walked, I became aware of the strong odor of peonies and jasmine. I inhaled deeply to draw in the lovely bouquet. The scent was from the fresh flowers of a lush garden. The path opened into a courtyard, a tangle of peonies and jasmine framing the entrance, blooming in spectacular fashion. Silky petals brushed against my skin. The tension building in my neck and shoulders melted away as I entered a fairyland. The rustle of the night breeze joined the familiar voice of Teresa Teng echoing from invisible speakers. Beneath my feet, a path of moss-covered stones led to a circular platform surrounded by a large, shallow pond. The night garden was bursting with a palette of muted greens, starlit ivories, and sparkling golds: the verdant lichen and waxy lily pads in the pond, the snowy white peonies and jasmine flowers, and the metallic tones of the fireflies suspended in the air, the square-holed coins lining the floor of the pond, and the special golden three-legged creatures resting on the floating fronds. I knew these creatures from my childhood. The feng shui symbol of prosperity, Jin Chan was transformed into a golden toad for stealing the peaches of immortality. Jin Chan's three legs represented heave, earth, and humanity. Statues of him graced every Chinese home I had ever been in, for fortune was a visitor always in demand. Ma-ma had placed one near the stairs leading to the front door. The pond before me held eight fabled toads, each biting on a coin. If not for the subtle rise and fall of their vocal sacs, I would have thought them statues.

She makes you look too little and you make her look too big. You’re from two different planets and you’re not meant to be standing together. She claps as if she’s meeting a five-year-old and I don’t like it when girls are taller than me. “Hello, Joseph,” she says, overenunciating. “I am Peach and this is my home.” “Nice to meet you,” I say and she looks me up and down. Cunt. “I love you already for not being pretentious,” she says. “And thank you for not bringing any wine or anything. This girl is family to me. No gifts allowed.” You are, of course, aghast. “Omigod, Peach, I completely flaked.” She looks down on you literally. “Sweetie, I just said I love it. And besides, the last thing we need is more cheap wine.” You are acting like you committed a felony and she looks at me like I’m the delivery guy waiting for a tip. “I’m stealing our girl for two minutes, Joseph.” You allow her to steal you and I really must look like the fucking delivery guy as I stand here, not knowing anyone, not being known. No girls are coming on to me and maybe I don’t look good in here. The only certainty is that I hate this Peach as much as I knew I would, and she hates me right back. She knows how to work you, Beck. You are apologizing for no wine, for not bringing Lynn and Chana, for not taking better care of your purse. And she is forgiving, stroking your back, telling you not to worry. I’m invisible to you in her presence, just like everyone else. Peach Is . . . in the way. I look around but nobody wants to say hi to me. It’s like they can smell the public school on me.

What could he say that might make sense to them? Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experience? That was the vital cement, wasn’t it? Could he say how he felt about their all being here tonight on this wild world running around a big sun which fell through a bigger space falling through yet vaster immensities of space, maybe toward and maybe away from Something? Could he say: we share this billion-mile-an-hour ride. We have common cause against the night. You start with little common causes. Why love the boy in a March field with his kite braving the sky? Because our fingers burn with the hot string singeing our hands. Why love some girl viewed from a train, bent to a country well? The tongue remembers iron water cool on some long lost noon. Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard, we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.

Though I was now in ill health and did not go out alone, and though I might never aspire to making love with them, it still gladdened me to know this, as though I were a child who, having been born in prison or a hospital, and having come to believe that the human organism can digest nothing but dry bread and medicines, suddenly learns that peaches, apricots, and grapes are not just pretty things that grow in the countryside, but mouth-watering delicacies on which one may feed. Even though the jailer or the nurse may prevent him from picking such fine fruit, the world seems a better place, and life itself more worth living. Any desire we may feel seems to us a finer thing, and we have an impression of it as a more reliable thing, when we know that external reality is in conformity with it, even if its fulfillment remains out of our personal reach.

Miss Rose sitting on a porch. Beside her, a bushel basket of ripe peaches or tomatoes. The drunkards buzzing, but easily smashed with a swat. Early mornings, she starts singing, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," and that's your cue to rise. To eat the heavy breakfast that will keep you full all day. Once you've helped her with peeling those tomatoes or peaches, there are weeds to be plucked from the garden, from around the vegetables that will show up fresh on the supper table. Fish need cleaning if Uncle Norman comes through with a prize. After dinner, the piecing together of quilt tops from remnants until the light completely fades. The next morning, it starts again. A woman singing off-key praises to the Lord. The sweet fruit dripping with juice. The sound of bugs. I thought of what Mama liked to say: to find this kind of love, you have to enter deep country.

The sauce. Memories flooded into her brain. It was zabaione. She had a sudden vision of herself, that first night in Tomasso's apartment, licking sauce from her fingers. Coffee. The next taste was coffee. Memories of Gennaro's espresso, and mornings in bed with a cup of cappuccino... but what was this? Bread soaked in sweet wine. And nuts--- a thin layer of hazelnut paste---and then fresh white peaches, sweet as sex itself, and then a layer of black chocolate so strong and bitter she almost stopped dead. There was more sweetness beyond it, though, a layer of pastry flavored with blackberries, and, right at the center, a single tiny fig. She put down the spoon, amazed. It was all gone. She had eaten it without being aware of eating, her mind in a reverie. "Did you like it?" She looked up. Somehow she wasn't surprised. "What was it?" she asked. "It doesn't have a name," Bruno said. "It's just... it's just the food of love.

How Much Do I Love You? I love you more than pancakes, more than ice cream, more than pickles, more than my life. I love you more than dogs or cats or diamonds or gold, more than anyone else in the world. I loved brushing your hair every night and walking you to school. I told you every story you knew. I want you to remember our last day. I read you a story about two sisters who could find their way through the woods even if it was dark. I want you to remember the last evening we had. We drank tea made of roses. We baked a peach pie. We had spaghetti with butter for supper. We looked at the stars with your father, sitting high up on the roof, and then I took you inside. I kissed you both good night. I hope you remember everything. Someday you will find this and you’ll know that to the very end I thought about you. There is no ending to that. You still hold my heart in your hands. I loved you girls more than a fish loves a river, more than a bird loves the sky. Remember that. Remember me.

She flipped through the notebook. In most places, Murphy’s large, crooked handwriting ate up the pages greedily, as if she couldn’t write large enough to get her point across. Occasionally Birdie’s more graceful handwriting appeared, adding asides or participating with Murphy in some kind of list she had thrown together, like favorite Leeda moments, or most unknown things about Leeda, or Leeda’s top five best articles of clothing. Mostly, though, it was all Murphy. Listing albums Leeda had to own before she died, like Janis Joplin’s Pearl. Copied scraps of her favorite poetry: about nature and despair and cities and even one or two about love that Murphy had annotated with words like Sickening, but she’s good and Horrible but worth reading. Dried leaves---pecan, magnolia, and, of course, the thin slivered shape of the peach leaf---taped in messy crisscrosses. A cider label Birdie had once kissed. A diagram of Leeda---outlined sloppily with colored-in blond hair, with words on the outside pointing to different parts of her: brainy pointing to her head, good posture pointing to her back, hot gams pointing to her legs, impenetrable (ha ha) pointing to her heart.

Why weep at strangers dead by the road? They resemble friends unseen in forty years. Why laugh when clowns are hit by pies? We taste custard, we taste life. Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses; life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul. But...how to say it? “Look,” he tried, “put two men in a rail car, one a soldier, the other a farmer. One talks war, the other wheat; and bore each other to sleep. But let one spell long-distance running, and if the other once ran the mile, why, those men will run all night like boys, sparking a friendship up from memory.

The Garden" How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, or bays, And their uncessant labours see Crown’d from some single herb or tree, Whose short and narrow verged shade Does prudently their toils upbraid; While all flow’rs and all trees do close To weave the garlands of repose. Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy sister dear! Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men; Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow. Society is all but rude, To this delicious solitude. No white nor red was ever seen So am’rous as this lovely green. Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, Cut in these trees their mistress’ name; Little, alas, they know or heed How far these beauties hers exceed! Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound, No name shall but your own be found. When we have run our passion’s heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. The gods, that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race: Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that she might laurel grow; And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a nymph, but for a reed. What wond’rous life in this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons as I pass, Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass. Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. Here at the fountain’s sliding foot, Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root, Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide; There like a bird it sits and sings, Then whets, and combs its silver wings; And, till prepar’d for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. Such was that happy garden-state, While man there walk’d without a mate; After a place so pure and sweet, What other help could yet be meet! But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share To wander solitary there: Two paradises ’twere in one To live in paradise alone. How well the skillful gard’ner drew Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new, Where from above the milder sun Does through a fragrant zodiac run; And as it works, th’ industrious bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!

One day, out of the blue, they just became too much. The faces of people who thought nothing of making endless demands, of being constantly given things. The way they sat at the table simply waiting to be served, not lifting a finger. Their certainty that they would be taken care of, without even having to try. I began, in an instant, to hate them. I couldn't be bothered to buy seasonal ingredients, prepare them, cook, choose the plates, serve up the food, then clear away the dishes and wash up for people like that. When I stopped being in touch, when I stopped doing the housework and the cooking, they panicked. Some of them became hyper-suspicious and their behavior took on a stalkerish air. Some of them, after returning to life alone, began neglecting themselves, and suffered physically as a result. Like babies, all of them, whose mother had ceased looking after them. It's odd, isn't it? Once I had found their incompetence, their reliance on me adorable. I believed, up until that point, that I liked pleasing them. Yet I suddenly saw that it was always just me, working away frenziedly, all alone." Rika didn't fail to notice the slightest change in Kajii's expression, the note of sorrow that went sliding across her peach-hued face. "Don't get the wrong idea. I like serving men and giving them pleasure. Women who don't don't deserve the name. But being with just one man, a changeable woman like me gets bored." "And yet you haven't given up looking for a marriage partner?" "It's just that I haven't met the right person yet." "I feel like what you're saying isn't---" "Cooking is enjoyable, but the moment it becomes a duty, it grows boring. The same is true of sex, and fashion, and beauty. When you're forced to do something, it becomes a chore, and the pleasure disappears." Rick's body felt heavy. She knew this was important, and yet she couldn't bring herself to ask a question. "The kind of wife that the men on those sites are looking for is, at base, a woman with no sense of life about her. Their ideal partner would be a kind of ghost." It wasn't at all hot in the room, and yet Rika's armpits were slick with lukewarm sweat. Even the gap between her sleeves and her wrists felt clammy. "The quickest way for a modern Japanese woman to gain the love of a man is to become corpse-like. The kind of men who want those women dead are dead themselves. Indeed, it's because they're dead that they're so terrified of anyone with a sense of life about them. If those men hadn't met me, if I hadn't rejected them, they'd quite probably have died anyway. They were never really here to begin with.

Probably, we should all hate you,” he was saying to Cade. “Illinois played against Northwestern that year for our homecoming, and you totally slaughtered us—” He broke off at the sound of a knock on the interior door to the suite. A woman in her early twenties, dressed in a skirt and a black T-shirt with “Sterling Restaurants” in red letters, walked into the suite pushing a three-tiered dessert cart. “Sweet Jesus, it’s here,” Charlie whispered reverently. Brooke fought back a smile. The dessert cart was something Sterling Restaurants had introduced a year ago, as a perk for all of the skyboxes and luxury suites at the sports arenas they collaborated with. Needless to say, it had been a huge success. Four kinds of cake (chocolate with toffee glaze, carrot cake, traditional cheesecake, and a pineapple-raspberry tart), three types of cookies (chocolate chip, M&M, and oatmeal raisin), blond brownies, dark chocolate brownies, lemon squares, peach cobbler, four kinds of dessert liquors, taffy apples, and, on the third tier, a make-your-own sundae bar with all the fixings. “Wow. That is some spread,” Vaughn said, wide-eyed. Simultaneously, the men sprang forward, bulldozed their way through the suite door, and attacked the cart like a pack of starving Survivor contestants. All except for one. Cade stayed right there, on the terrace. He leaned back against the railing, stretching out his tall, broad-shouldered frame. “Whew. I thought they’d never leave

This Compost" Something startles me where I thought I was safest, I withdraw from the still woods I loved, I will not go now on the pastures to walk, I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea, I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me. O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken? How can you be alive you growths of spring? How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you? Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead? Where have you disposed of their carcasses? Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd, I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath, I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat. 2 Behold this compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold! The grass of spring covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches, The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree, The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests, The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs, The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare, Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves, Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards, The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead. What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious, That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me, That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, That all is clean forever and forever, That the cool drink from the well tastes so good, That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease. Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

And for the four remaining days - the ninety-six remaining hours - we mapped out a future away from everything we knew. When the walls of the map were breached, we gave one another courage to build them again. And we imagined our home an old stone barn filled with junk and wine and paintings, surrounded by fields of wildflowers and bees. I remember our final day in the villa. We were supposed to be going that evening, taking the sleeper back to England. I was on edge, a mix of nerves and excitement, looking out to see if he made the slightest move toward leaving, but he didn’t. Toiletries remained on the bathroom shelves, clothes stayed scattered across the floor. We went to the beach as usual, lay side by side in our usual spot. The heat was intense and we said little, certainly nothing of our plans to move up to Provence, to the lavender and light. To the fields of sunflowers. I looked at my watch. We were almost there. It was happening. I kept saying to myself, he’s going to do it. I left him on the bed dozing, and went out to the shop to get water and peaches. I walked the streets as if they were my new home. Bonjour to everyone, me walking barefoot, oh so confident, free. And I imagined how we’d go out later to eat, and we’d celebrate at our bar. And I’d phone Mabel and Mabel would say, I understand. I raced back to the villa, ran up the stairs and died. Our rucksacks were open on the bed, our shoes already packed away inside. I watched him from the door. He was silent, his eyes red. He folded his clothes meticulously, dirty washing in separate bags. I wanted to howl. I wanted to put my arms around him, hold him there until the train had left the station. I’ve got peaches and water for the journey, I said. Thank you, he said. You think of everything. Because I love you, I said. He didn’t look at me. The change was happening too quickly. Is there a taxi coming? My voice was weak, breaking. Madame Cournier’s taking us. I went to open the window, the scent of tuberose strong. I lit a cigarette and looked at the sky. An airplane cast out a vivid orange wake that ripped across the violet wash. And I remember thinking, how cruel it was that our plans were out there somewhere. Another version of our future, out there somewhere, in perpetual orbit. The bottle of pastis? he said. I smiled at him. You take it, I said. We lay in our bunks as the sleeper rattled north and retraced the journey of ten days before. The cabin was dark, an occasional light from the corridor bled under the door. The room was hot and airless, smelled of sweat. In the darkness, he dropped his hand down to me and waited. I couldn’t help myself, I reached up and held it. Noticed my fingertips were numb. We’ll be OK, I remember thinking. Whatever we are, we’ll be OK. We didn’t see each other for a while back in Oxford. We both suffered, I know we did, but differently. And sometimes, when the day loomed gray, I’d sit at my desk and remember the heat of that summer. I’d remember the smells of tuberose that were carried by the wind, and the smell of octopus cooking on the stinking griddles. I’d remember the sound of our laughter and the sound of a doughnut seller, and I’d remember the red canvas shoes I lost in the sea, and the taste of pastis and the taste of his skin, and a sky so blue it would defy anything else to be blue again. And I’d remember my love for a man that almost made everything possible./

What is that?” “Oh, it's… well, something personal to Lady Holly, and… sir, she wouldn't like it if ye—” Maude spluttered with dismayed protests as Zachary reached over and plucked the frame case from the pile. “A miniature?” he asked, deftly shaking the object from its leather casing. “Yes, sir, but… you shouldn't, really… oh, dear.” Maude's pudgy cheeks reddened, and she sighed in patent discomfort as he stared at the little portrait. “George,” Zachary said quietly. He had never seen a likeness of the man, had never wanted to before. It was only to be expected that Holly should carry a portrait of her late husband, for Rose's benefit as well as her own. However, Zachary had never asked to view a likeness of George Taylor, and Holly had certainly never volunteered to show him. Perhaps Zachary had expected that he would feel a pang of animosity at the sight of Taylor's face, but as he stared at the miniature, he was conscious only of a surprising feeling of pity. He had always thought of George as a contemporary, but this face was impossibly young, adorned with sideburns that amounted to a bit of peach fuzz on either side of his cheeks. Zachary was startled by the realization that Taylor couldn't have been more than twenty-four when he died, almost a full ten years younger than Zachary was now. Holly had been wooed and loved by this handsome boy, with his golden blond hair and untroubled blue eyes, and a smile that hinted of mischief. George had died before he'd barely tasted of life, widowing a girl who had been even more innocent than he. Try as he might, Zachary couldn't blame George Taylor for trying to protect Holly, arrange things for her, ensure that his infant daughter was taken care of. No doubt George would have been anguished at the thought of his wife being seduced and made miserable by the Zachary Bronsons of the world.

She remembers her name. She remembers the name of the president. She remembers the name of the president’s dog. She remembers what city she lives in. And on which street. And in which house. The one with the big olive tree where the road takes a turn. She remembers what year it is. She remembers the season. She remembers the day on which you were born. She remembers the daughter who was born before you – She had your father’s nose, that was the first thing I noticed about her – but she does not remember that daughter’s name. She remembers the name of the man she did not marry – Frank – and she keeps his letters in a drawer by her bed. She remembers that you once had a husband, but she refuses to remember your ex-husband’s name. That man, she calls him. She does not remember how she got the bruises on her arms or going for a walk with you earlier this morning. She does not remember bending over, during that walk, and plucking a flower from a neighbour’s front yard and slipping it into her hair. Maybe your father will kiss me now. She does not remember what she ate for dinner last night, or when she last took her medicine. She does not remember to drink enough water. She does not remember to comb her hair. She remembers the rows of dried persimmons that once hung from the eaves of her mother’s house in Berkeley. They were the most beautiful shade of orange. She remembers that your father loves peaches. She remembers that every Sunday morning, at ten, he takes her for a drive down to the sea in the brown car. She remembers that every evening, right before the eight o’clock news, he sets two fortune cookies on a paper plate and announces to her that they are having a party. She remembers that on Mondays he comes home from the college at four, and if he is even five minutes late she goes out to the gate and begins to wait for him. She remembers which bedroom is hers and which is his. She remembers that the bedroom that is now hers was once yours. She remembers that it wasn’t always like this...

STRAWBERRY SHORTBREAD BAR COOKIES Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position.   Hannah’s 1st Note: These are really easy and fast to make. Almost everyone loves them, including Baby Bethie, and they’re not even chocolate! 3 cups all purpose flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) ¾ cup powdered (confectioner’s) sugar (don’t sift un- less it’s got big lumps) 1 and ½ cups salted butter, softened (3 sticks, 12 ounces, ¾ pound) 1 can (21 ounces) strawberry pie filling (I used Comstock)*** *** - If you can’t find strawberry pie filling, you can use another berry filling, like raspberry, or blueberry. You can also use pie fillings of larger fruits like peach, apple, or whatever. If you do that, cut the fruit pieces into smaller pieces so that each bar cookie will have some. I just put my apple or peach pie filling in the food processor with the steel blade and zoop it up just short of being pureed. I’m not sure about using lemon pie filling. I haven’t tried that yet. FIRST STEP: Mix the flour and the powdered sugar together in a medium-sized bowl. Cut in the softened butter with a two knives or a pastry cutter until the resulting mixture resembles bread crumbs or coarse corn meal. (You can also do this in a food processor using cold butter cut into chunks that you layer between the powdered sugar and flour mixture and process with the steel blade, using an on-and-off pulsing motion.) Spread HALF of this mixture (approximately 3 cups will be fine) into a greased (or sprayed with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray) 9-inch by 13-inch pan. (That’s a standard size rectangular cake pan.) Bake at 350 degrees F. for 12 to 15 minutes, or until the edges are just beginning to turn golden brown. Remove the pan to a wire rack or a cold burner on the stove, but DON’T TURN OFF THE OVEN! Let the crust cool for 5 minutes. SECOND STEP: Spread the pie filling over the top of the crust you just baked. Sprinkle the crust with the other half of the crust mixture you saved. Try to do this as evenly as possible. Don’t worry about little gaps in the topping. It will spread out and fill in a bit as it bakes. Gently press the top crust down with the flat blade of a metal spatula. Bake the cookie bars at 350 degrees F. for another 30 to 35 minutes, or until the top is lightly golden. Turn off the oven and remove the pan to a wire rack or a cold burner to cool completely. When the bars are completely cool, cover the pan with foil and refrigerate them until you’re ready to cut them. (Chilling them makes them easier to cut.) When you’re ready to serve them, cut the Strawberry Shortbread Bar Cookies into brownie-sized pieces, arrange them on a pretty platter, and if you like, sprinkle the top with extra powdered sugar.

THE NIGHTGOWN was only the first of the garments in the box. There were seven nightgowns, in fact—one for each day of the week—of delicate silk, lovely georgette, and beautiful tiffany. As Alexandra pulled them out, she draped them on the bed. She’d never seen a nightgown that wasn’t white, but these were almond and pale blush pink, powder blue and soft peach, with delicate edgings of lace and intricate, exquisite embroidery. “They’re stunning,” she said. “Madame Rodale has nothing like them in her book of fashion plates.” Tris just grinned. He seemed different tonight. More relaxed, less worried. She didn’t know what had prompted his sudden good humor, but she didn’t want to question it. She’d rather enjoy it instead. After the afternoon she’d had—starting with Elizabeth’s letter and ending with three fruitless interviews—she wasn’t about to risk the one thing that seemed to be going right. “Are you going to try one on for me?” he asked. Her face heated. He chose a nightgown off the bed, palest lavender with black lace and violet embroidery. “This one,” he said, handing it to her. “Do you require assistance with your dress?” “Just the buttons,” she said, and turned to let him unfasten them. She shifted the nightgown in her hands. It felt so light. “There,” he said when the back of her green dress gaped open. He kissed her softly on the nape of her neck, then settled on one of the striped chairs, sipping from the glass of port he’d brought upstairs with him. “Use the dressing room. I’ll be waiting.” In the dressing room, she shakily stripped out of her frock, chemise, shoes, and stockings, then dropped the nightgown over her head and smoothed it down over her hips. The fabric whispered against her legs. She turned to see herself in the looking glass. Sweet heaven. She’d never imagined nightgowns like this existed. Her nightgowns all had high collars that tied at the throat. This one had a wide, low neckline. Her nightgowns all had long, full sleeves. This one had tiny puffed sleeves that began halfway off her shoulders. Her nightgowns were made of yards and yards of thick, billowing fabric. This one was a slender column that left no curve to the imagination. It was wicked. “Are you ready yet?” Tris called. Alexandra swallowed hard, reminding herself that he’d seen her in less clothing. And he was her husband. Still, wearing the nightgown for him somehow felt more intimate than wearing nothing at all. She was as ready as she’d ever be. Drawing a deep breath, she exited the dressing room, walked quickly through the sitting room, and paused in the bedroom’s doorway. She dropped her gaze, then raised her lashes, giving him the look—the one Juliana had said would make men fall at her feet. Judging from the expression on Tris’s face, it was a good thing he was sitting. The way he looked at her made her heartbeat accelerate. He rose and moved toward her. She met him halfway, licking suddenly dry lips. “Will you kiss me?” she asked softly, reaching up to sweep that always unruly lock off his forehead. It worked this time. He kissed her but good.