Читать книгу The Great Race to Sycamore Street - J. Samia Mair - Страница 7

The peach tree on Sycamore Street

GRANDMA Hana lived on Sycamore Street in the small town of Cherry Hill in Fairfax County, Maryland. The funny thing about it was that there were no sycamore trees on Sycamore Street and, as far as anyone knew, no hill anywhere in town covered with cherries. But there was Grandma Hana’s famous peach tree.

The peach tree first became famous because Grandma Hana had planted a nectarine pit. She had eaten a freshly picked nectarine that was so delicious that she decided to plant the pit. But instead of growing a nectarine tree, the pit turned into a peach tree. As she later learned, peaches and nectarines are so closely related that sometimes when you plant one, you get the other. The second thing that made the tree famous was the way the peaches tasted. The honey-colored flesh was smooth and oozed with juice. Each bite had the perfect mixture of sweetness and tanginess. Grandma Hana’s peaches tasted like peaches should taste, and like no other peaches in all of Maryland. The third reason for the tree’s fame was its strength. It had survived ice storms, blizzards, hurricanes, and all sorts of pests and diseases that took down countless other trees. Yet it never failed to produce the best peaches, even though it was more than thirty years old, decades past what should have been its peak. What made the tree the most famous of all was that Grandma Hana’s peach pie never lost the pie contest at the Fairfax County Fair. Friends, neighbors, just about anyone who knew about the peach tree, looked forward to the harvest, so they could eat some of Grandma Hana’s pie. At one point, a businessman approached Grandma Hana and offered to help her start a business selling pies. But Grandma turned the offer down. She told him that “peaches were a gift from God and gifts were meant to be shared.”

Splat!

A huge cicada smashed loudly against the front windshield of their grandmother’s car and stuck there.

“Ahhh!” Hude yelled like a young girl and jumped back in his seat.

He was sitting in the front passenger’s seat but it was still hard for Amani to hear him amongst the deafening, screeching, shrill sound of the cicadas.

“This is awesome!” Hude yelled, smiling back at Amani.

This unwelcome bug adventure was decidedly not awesome, Amani thought.

It was one thing reading about Tad Walker and the ginormous Hercules beetle he discovered in his hammock. It was quite another thing to experience a ginormous bug oneself!

“When will this end, Grandma?” Hana yelled up front.

“It’s been going on for a few weeks now. In a few days we’ll be back to the normal sounds of summer.” Grandma Hanna smiled. “You’ll be twenty-six years old before you see this glorious show again, inshallah.”

“Too soon as far as I’m concerned,” Amani said.

Trying to forget the world around her, Amani imagined the delicious smell of peaches ripening on the tree. Nothing compared to biting into a freshly picked, perfectly ripe peach on a hot summer day. The first bite of the season was always the best. When she was younger, she looked forward to the peach harvest every year. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much she had missed the last couple of summers with her grandmother. She thought she had outgrown some things like the rope swing and playing hide-and-seek in the cornfield next to her grandmother’s house. Amani breathed in deeply. The smell of horse manure seeped through the car windows. Her thoughts were flooded with childhood memories.

Grandma Hana stopped the car in front of 494 Sycamore Street. Everything looked the same—except, of course, for the swarms of cicadas in the air. The old white farmhouse sat on a large tract of green grass. Multicolored echinacea, climbing roses, gerbera daisies, and many other flowers that Amani could not name were in full bloom everywhere.

Grandma’s house always looks as if a rainbow has fallen from the sky and painted it, Amani thought.

She liked the way that sounded and made a mental note to write the sentence down in her journal when she got inside.

The front porch wrapped around one side of the house. Two weather-worn rocking chairs and a large gliding chair sat in their same spots on the porch. She and her brother had spent many summer evenings there, listening to their grandfather’s stories, while their grandmother crocheted delicate lacework for her scarves. Looking at the porch, Amani could almost smell her grandfather’s musk perfume. It was the only perfume that he used. He told her that the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that musk was the most fragrant of scents and that the sweat of people in paradise smelled like musk. Her grandfather’s eyes would tear when he said that the Prophet’s scent was described as more fragrant than musk.

But the heart of the farmhouse was the extraordinarily large peach tree in the backyard. It was planted in the center of a small rise at the end of their grandmother’s property that sloped down to the neighbor’s property. It stood majestically, like a priceless sculpture displayed in a museum. Each season brought new beauty. In spring, clusters of pink blossoms erupted as one. In autumn, slender leaves drifted to the earth, encircling the tree in a carpet of coppery brown. In winter, snow rested on the branches outlining the tree in sparkling white. But nothing compared to summer, when the tree burst with glistening golden-orange fruit, surrounded by bright green leaves against a vast blue sky.

To the right of the farmhouse was a cornfield. Woods were to the left. Although it was overgrown, Amani could still see the entrance to the path that led to the lake with the rope swing.

“That’s weird, Grandma,” Hude said. “The cicadas seem to be attacking only the trees with leaves. The pine trees don’t seem to be bothered at all.”

“Grandma, the peach tree!” Amani yelled.

Grandma Hana turned around.

“Don’t worry, dear. The peach tree is fine, alhamdulillah. Mr. Fenby helped me cover it with netting.”

Grandma Hana noticed Hude’s bow case on the seat next to Amani.

“Hude, I have a surprise for you inside. It’s something Grandpop would have wanted you to have.”

Hude jumped out of the car first and grabbed his belongings. Amani followed, holding her suitcase in one hand and shielding her face with her backpack in the other. They zigzagged to the front door, dodging bugs. Hude stopped briefly and a cicada landed on his shirt. Feeling brave, he picked it up. But the bug buzzed so loudly he dropped it almost immediately. Amani didn’t stop running until she was inside.