Because I Don’t Know How to Explain Longing to Her, I Teach My Daughter to Name the Peaches

by Emily Louise Smith

Ruby Prince, I say, cradling the fruit 
in my palm, Gala, Winblo. Hear how each 
varietal ripens in its own sweet time, unfurls 
a new week of summer—June to August, 
cling to freestone, yellow deepening to gold. 
When I say Bounty, can you feel 
the flesh slide away from the pit?

These peaches began, like you, in February, 
with a congregation of farmers praying 
into the same soft pews as me for enough 
chill hours, for the orchards not to break 
their dormancy. Does anything so much 
as a Loring prove the sweetness 
of hunger born in winter? My body 

longed for you like that. I don’t know 
yet if you’ll sink into a Cresthaven 
and taste, as I do, the corn grown nearby. 
If you’ll remember your grandfather
and how deftly—even after a decade blind—
his hands worked the smallest paring knife 
along a Contender’s skin, him holding you

when I first brought you home. It’s hard 
to say if you’ll become fluent in our lost code 
of naming, grief, and dust. If the word 
Monroe will launch in your chest a throb 
of honeybees singing. If fruit clinging 
to its seed will remind you too of a ragged sun. 
If a bite of Flame Prince decades from now 

will hasten you back to the time I put up jars 
of South Carolina peaches to indulge you 
in summer all year—the people who still ask 
after their favorite varietals by name, the unrushed 
pace of Nana’s house, her arms encircling 
my childless body and beckoning you
to take root. All I know for sure is later 
that fall as we lay on a blanket outside, 
your sticky fingers curled toward my cheek, 
and I smelled not the Red Maple above us 
nor the sea we live beside now but the orchards 
of my childhood. And I understood exactly how long 
a shadow can grow inside a body, how one becomes 
the other’s memory and shade.

Emily Louise Smith is the publisher of Lookout Books and the magazine Ecotone. She teaches publishing and creative writing at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and is at work on a memoir.

Illustration by Justine Swindell.