Stand on the deck of the Golden Eagle Ferry crossing the Mississippi River and receive a peach from your friend who is taking them from his orchard in Calhoun County, Illinois, to a market in St. Louis, Missouri. Let the breeze blow your hair and let the sun shine full on your face and let the juice drip on your chin as you taste the sweetest peach you’ve ever had.

Drive about 200 miles to Hood River, Oregon, on the Columbia River, go to an organic grower, and buy 100 pounds of peaches, only a tiny fraction of his harvest, just a few small boxes in that huge warehouse. Drive back home to the coast, where it is too wet and chilly to grow peaches, and put the boxes of peaches into your kitchen, where they now appear huge because they take up a lot of space in the kitchen. Spend the next day processing those peaches into canning jars. In the dark and rainy winter, open a jar, share the peaches with your family, and taste the fruit of summer sun.

Invite all your sisters to your home, and prepare together the peach cream pie from the red Betty Crocker cookbook, in honor of your mother, your childhood memories, and your sisterhood. Eat this pie together at the end of a sumptuous feast. Laugh and talk into the night, and then eat just one more small piece of that pie, while you sit together on the porch swing in the moonlight.

In China, buy a few peaches from a street vendor who holds a hand scale and adds enough peaches to make an even weight, never taking any away to make a smaller weight, haggle for a minute or two—just to engage in the game—then pay a comparatively low price, and take them to your apartment. Wash carefully with your bottled drinking water, sit down and marvel that this treat is available to you.

Go next door to your neighbor who has a peach tree in her backyard. Take a dishpan full of her peaches home. Peel them, slice them , and put them in the freezer for use later on, when you will put the frozen peaches with some other fruits and perhaps some yogurt into the blender to make a delicious energy drink before swimming, bicycling, or running.

Open your refrigerator when you arrive home from a long trip, and find a large box that says, “Life is Beautiful. Eat a peach.” Open the box and see that it is full of large ripe Colorado peaches, a gift from your daughter to welcome you home. Eat one right away, because life really is beautiful, especially when you can EAT A PEACH.