There are really only two kinds of people in the world: those who would gladly stop at a roadside produce stand to pick up peaches that were requested from a loved one and those who think that such a request is the most overwhelming, ludicrous solicitation in the history of time.
There are givers and there are a**holes.
A few summers ago, I decided, after a couple of glasses of wine on a Friday night, to wake up early the next morning and drive from Charlotte to West Virginia to meet my mother-in-law, Mary, and surprise my sister-in-law, Lynn, for her birthday. I am not usually a spur-of-the-moment kind of gal and I’m not particularly fond of road trips.
However, I was going to do it. I love Lynn dearly. It was going to be all kinds of fun. I was going to do all the nice things.
On Saturday morning, as I was packing up to go, my mother-in-law texted and said that if I saw any roadside produce stands that she would love to have some peaches. I started spiraling into a quirky, anxiety-ridden abyss.
What? Stop for peaches? Where? That meant I was going to have to actively look for a produce stand. I bet produce stands only took cash. I didn’t have any cash. That meant that I was going to have to go to an ATM. It meant that it would be one more place that I’d have to wait on then-toddler Conley to get unbuckled and decide on her route out of the car…you know, because simply going out the door closest to where she is sitting is ridiculous. I’d then have to look for peaches and pick out good ones. I’d have to chat with the produce stand owner. Then I’d have to wait on Conley to climb back in the car like she is one of the Three Stooges.
I was already doing all the nice things! There was no room for a peach stop. However, I love my mother-in-law. I knew that she would have gladly stopped for peaches or a metal sculpture of a pig that I found on CraigsList or an antique carriage bed in fair to good condition. There would have been no anxiety about it beforehand and no indignation afterward. She would have simply stopped, picked up what I asked for and been back on the merry path that the good people of the world get to take.
Fortunately, I had some peaches, granted ones that I had just bought at a grocery store and not out of the back of a pick-up on a gravel turnaround off the interstate, and I took her those.
Over the weekend Lynn, whom also believes that stopping for roadside peaches whilst traveling with a toddler is akin to a death by a thousand paper cuts, and I tried to explain why this was simply a bonkers request for people like us, the a**holes of the world. We tried to explain how we WANTED to be people who would gladly stop for peaches for our beloved matriarch; how that we didn’t want to have a quota of nice things we could do at a given time; how we wanted to be like her.
She shook her head in disbelief. I’m pretty sure that after living a gracious, life of service to those she loves she was stunned to find herself surrounded by such quirky lot. I get it. I do. But, even today the thought of stopping for peaches when I was already doing “all the nice things” fills me with dread.
To Mary, the one who has loved me as one of her own and back from the brink of my own self-loathing, thank you for always being a peach stopper, for loving us even when we don’t deserve it and for never reaching your limit of nice things.
You are all the nice things!
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
