The giant peach tree and the one who sees it.
In the centre, just before the low and sparse wire fence at the back of my grandmother’s house, stood a giant peach tree that produced too much fruit. I say too much, but what I mean is that it produced more fruit than the household could consume. As a result of this, at the height of every summer, the air was sometimes thick with the smell of rotting fruit lying bruised and sticky at the bottom of its trunk. My grandmother would instruct us to pick the ripe fruit before it too fell to the ground, adding to the frenzy of fruit flies that were already feasting on the heap below. She, with painstaking patience and steadier hands, would scrape off the labels and wash old mayonnaise glass jars to preserve her bounty and later share these with family, visitors and strangers alike. I stood in that same backyard the other day remembering those hot summer mornings when we would climb that tree as instructed. Inkukhu zika MaMpondo, the friendly pipe-smoking neighbour would flutter f...