Going home. Standing still.
Watching the peaches grow.
Going on five weeks now every Sunday we go home. Home home. Which, is, for me, West Liberty, Iowa. I pack up a duffel bag worth of baby stuff and take my two daughters to visit my parents. It started, in part, as an act of pragmatism. I wanted to give my wife a break. A respite from the almost-four-year and not-quite-seven-week old. A chunk of time every Sunday morning where momma can relax. But pretty much from the get-go something else started happening. Our excursions were giving me an opportunity to slow down as well. To appreciate the way that time seems to stretch when one is both in a small town and the house that you grew up in. Let’s talk about it.
Maybe it was a subconscious thing, but I decided on the first week of our Sunday trips that I wouldn’t take my laptop or smartphone. That I wouldn’t stay tapped in to email chains and doom scroll holes and life in unprecedented times. It wasn’t a grandiose act, but rather a decision I made right before we double-triple-checked the diaper bag for all the necessary baby accoutrements. And the trip itself wasn’t revelatory. Our car crackled into the gravel driveway to surprise my parents (they didn’t think we would actually come that early) and had breakfast. Fried eggs and fresh tortillas. My oldest, Marisol, reveled in the pile of tortillas my mom was churning out in the middle of the kitchen table.
Mari and my dad, which she calls her Tata, worked on a puzzle. My mom and Tia took turns coo-ing over Mari’s younger sister, Luna. I took turns talking with my parents and Tia. There were significant stretches where we didn’t say much at all. I noticed the, and I believe this is the proper unit, metric-shit-ton of plants that my mom has in the living room. Though I’ve seen them before, it felt like the first time I actually acknowledged both the number of, and heartiness of my moms plants. If them plants had bones they’d be feeling dense af.1
In the book How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, the author talks about her experience with bird watching. How, as she slowed down and actually noticed the flora and fauna around where she lived, she would notice the robustness of life around her. She would start to be able to differentiate different bird types…then actual individual birds that lived by her. Now I’m not saying that I’m going to start sporting binoculars or trying to categorize all of the plants in my mom’s living room jungle. At the time of this writing I’m still in my thirties2 and I don’t think I’ve quite hit my bird-watching plant daddy era. Although, no lie, my moms plants have got me taking better care of the small number of plants I do have in our house. And I did come across a YouTube channel on caring for houseplants…and subscribed to the persons newsletter. Dang maybe I should just let it happen huh? Maybe if I did I’ve have more moments like the one Mari and I had when we laid under my parent’s peach tree…
Some time after I move out of the house, my dad and some of his brothers built a deck facing their backyard. My tios were coming to visit for the weekend and they decided to knock out the deck in an afternoon. There are only two groups I’ve heard that tie family visits with break-neck home renovation projects: Mexicans and the Amish. Anyway above a corner of the deck is a peach tree. Yes. A peach tree in Iowa. For the longest time I didn’t believe my dad when he told me it was a peach tree. Then one summer it bore fruit and we had buckets and buckets of peaches.
That first Sunday I sat on a picnic table on the deck under the tree. Eventually I sprawled onto my back on the bench, to look up the the pear tree canopy above me. Mari came up to me, “Dada what are you doing?”
“I’m looking up at the tree.”
“Why are you doing that?”
“I don’t know. It feels nice to not do anything. To listen to the wind and birds and see how the leaves move when the wind blows them. Can you see how the leaves are moving?”
My daughter gave an affirmation and giggled, most likely at her daddy being silly. But as the weeks go by I keep going back to the same spot under the peaches. Each week I see that they are slightly, slightly bigger. I point this out to my girl. It feels like the slowest, most subtle season of some art-house TV show. “Tune in every week to see the almost imperceptible growth of your favorite stone fruit.” But I’m excited to return and to share in this slow growth with my daughters. A part of me wonders if my oldest will remember any part of these Sunday trips. It feels like she is on the cusp of her first bonafide long-term core memories. Will she remember the taste of my mom’s tortillas the way that I remember my grandmother piling them on the same table in the same house some thirty-five years prior? Will she remember her father laying, looking up at a tree, stopping for a brief moment to appreciate how we can still notice the passing of time by the bearing of fruit.
More soon.
-Chuy
This is a Frank Ocean reference.
By like one month. It’s about to be Leo season up in here.
Love this, Chuy.
Whenever I see that you have a new post my breath catches in my throat and I can’t wait to get the time to read it! This did not disappoint. Thank you for your regular bursts of beauty.