It’s hard to recall the exact moment it felt like the walls were closing in. It wasn’t the first day of the shelter-in-place order or even the second, but on 21 March, I took a walk along Ten Mile beach near my home in Mendocino county, California, and snapped a picture, labeling it “Today’s outside.” It didn’t get much engagement; as a brand strategy, as the kids like to say, it was a dud.
But I kept doing it, because I am not a brand. I’m a person who loves Outside, and wanted to share it with people trapped in their homes. I caught a passing bird. Ominous clouds. A little waterfall. A killer sunset while comet hunting. The dump.
And something happened. People started responding. They remarked on the beauty they found in scenes of my daily life. They tagged in other people and encouraged them to follow. They thanked me for posting images of Outside, because they were trapped Inside. They got hometown nostalgia. Some even started sending me pictures of their own Outsides. Today’s Outside doesn’t go up every day, but it goes up often enough; if I post late or miss a day, people ask after it. One reader told me she “waits for this every day” in response to an Instagram story of crashing waves gilded by the sunset.
Today’s Outside pic.twitter.com/EngrK0Lz9K
— s.e. smith (@sesmith) August 18, 2020
And then peach season started. Last August, I documented every peach I ate, much like author Chuck Wendig charts his apple consumption, and I decided to keep doing it, an anchor of normality in weird times. I like peaches; many people like peaches. I figured, let’s share peaches as a collective experience, feeling the tingle of a sense memory at the sight of them. That heady floral smell. The smooth, firm yet giving texture. The way the peach rounds in your hand, soft and curved perfectly against your palm’s life line, a physical embodiment of the peach emoji’s complex multiple meanings.
This year’s peaches were special, though. The farmstand is an hour from my house and after months of not going further than the city limits, after being confined by Covid to a narrow slice of Outside, I got in my car one day and drove to Anderson Valley, leaving the windows down so I could smell the crackling, dry, earthy smells that permeate the air in summer. It felt daring and adventurous to be blasting some Femmes and whizzing along the road, almost empty, still.
I posted my haul: “Some…personal news.” “LET’S FUCKING GO!!!,” an exuberant commenter replied. It was strangely touching to see that the internet, place of short memories, recalled last summer’s peaches.
I didn’t think I could pull off another season of peaches this year, expecting people to complain and suck all the joy from it, but here I am. Sometimes an entry may spark jealousy, but also sometimes it inspires people to have some peaches of their own, or to tell me about great peaches they have eaten. People mention me in posts about their own peach doings, and it makes my heart swell a little more each time. Sometimes people ask me for recipes and consult on how to tell the difference between a clingstone and freestone peach. (Cut it open or know the cultivar. I know that’s not the answer you want to hear. Sorry.)
Three pic.twitter.com/x8PSLq32mX
— s.e. smith (@sesmith) June 22, 2020
The peaches and the Outside, which sometimes appear together in my posts, are a respite. Today’s Outside takes viewers through sherbet skies, Fogust evenings, and sunsets that to me were dull and boring until I saw them through fresh eyes. It isn’t about the Outside – I mean, it is, I live in a beautiful place – but about the moment of common shared pleasure, of gazing upon something in the timeline that is not the firehose of Content and performative handwringing. This is a good thing, something that has arisen from the salted earth of coronavirus, something pure and simple that we share together; every “like” and friendly comment is an affirmation and a reminder that we are who we make ourselves to be, that the sum total of ourselves doesn’t need to be our product or contribution to capitalism.
Sometimes a peach eaten on a beach during a beautiful sunset, juices dripping down your wrist, is just a peach, and it is good, and all is well, and you should stop overthinking it. “If my brand devolves to ‘that person who makes a thread of every peach they eat every summer’, I’ll consider my life’s goals fulfilled,” I wrote last August. Judging from the contents of my mentions, I’m well on the way.
In case you’re wondering, it’s 1 September, and I’ve hit 100 peaches for summer 2020.
s.e. smith is a National Magazine Award-winning essayist, journalist and peach enthusiast based in northern California
