Today's Holidays: Eat a Peach Day, Take Your Cat to the Vet Day, Be an Angel Day
Website of the Day: https://people.com/pets/take-your-cat-to-the-vet-day-ian-somerhalder/
Fact of the Day: Each year, the largest peach cobbler is made in Georgia, measuring 11 by 5 feet!
My morning started off like this: I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing and I opened my tired eyes to see my boss's name flashing on the screen.
Work. What time was it? 9:12. Was I supposed to work today? Oh my god I was supposed to be there at 9.
In contrast to my usual half an hour at best to get out of bed, I jumped up, threw on my work shirt, grabbed my keys, and drove twenty miles over the speed limit to get to work.
I'm so hungry. Why didn't I grab a yogurt on my way out? Oh no, I think I'm working until six. That's nine hours without food. Who can bring me food?
When I got to the farm (without being pulled over), thankfully, there were no cars in the parking lot. I sat down in a chair in the market in silence, forced to contemplate the fact that a) I did not brush my hair. b) I did not brush my teeth. c) The fans in the market were making me really cold, and I wished I had a sweatshirt. d) I was so hungry and I still had eight and half more hours to go before I could devour the leftover chicken parm my mom made last night.
I guess I’ll just eat a peach for now to tide me over until someone brings me food.
I walked over to the bins of peaches for sale and picked out a soft one, rinsed it with water, and took a bite.
The sweetness surprised me, but not in the way the phone call from my boss did this morning. No, this surprise was one I planned to savor for as long as possible. The peach’s juice trickled down my chin, and I embraced the moment, allowing the juice to fall into the napkin beneath me. Vivid in its yellow color, the peach’s flesh gradually emerged, and with each patch of skin I scraped away, the greater my desire to dig deeper into the flesh. My teeth scraped the surface of the pit, but it wasn’t until I ate every ounce of the sugary fruit that I resurfaced to reality.
Wow, that peach was my savior.
I stood at the register with a smile plastered on my face, ready to greet the customers, bed-head, morning breath, goosebumps, and all. But none of that mattered anymore, because my stomach danced with satisfaction and the sweetness still lingered in my mouth.
Now, of course, that didn’t stop me from texting my mom and asking her to bring me the Green Goddess Cobb Salad (no bacon and substitute balsamic dressing) from Panera for lunch.
But, the point was, I celebrated Eat a Peach Day like my life depended on it (and in some ways, it did, because otherwise I might have either collapsed from starvation or started a new job search, since I would have probably been fired for my “I’m so tired, I’m so hungry, I need a comb and maybe some deodorant” attitude).
In your time of need, you never know who or what will be there to save you, and for me, it was a peach. Throughout the rest of the day, I watched customer after customer buy peaches, and I smiled wondering if they would enjoy their peaches as much as I had enjoyed mine.
When I was a child, my mom would take my brother and me to Lee's Turkey Farm, where I now work, to pick peaches, apples, tomatoes, and pumpkins. Jake and I would climb up on the ladder and stretch our little hands around the peaches, feeling the fur of the peach on our palms. We would compete to see who could find the biggest, sweetest, most vibrant peach, and if my peach won, I would hold onto it, separate from the other peaches in the bucket. A rush of excitement felt as if it was running through me as I kept my peach on a pedestal, myself along with it for being the one who found it.
Childhood innocence, some would call this feeling, and perhaps that is why I celebrated Eat a Peach Day with such dedication. It could have been that I was hungry, or maybe the peach really did provide me with the nutrients I needed for an energy boost. Yet the underlying reason, and perhaps the more true one, was that the peach, so perfect in nature, reminded me of the past, of this childhood innocence.
And for just a moment, I was back on that ladder, stretching my little, chubby hand around an enormous peach with my mom and brother alongside me.
Happy Eat a Peach Day! How did you celebrate? Comment below or send in a photo to nationalholidaymovement@gmail.com ! #NationalHolidayMovement #BeHappy