The Fruit Stand

By Peter Bowden


The stand sat on a bend of the highway, where asphalt gave way to gravel and cotton fields breathed dust into the air. It was nothing more than a lean-to of rough-hewn boards and flapping canvas, but the fruit glowed in the Georgia sun—peaches soft as breath, tomatoes red as old barn doors, melons heavy as promise. The kind of place folks slowed for, even if they didn’t mean to.

The man ran it, same as his father before him, and his father before that. Three generations in the same patch of dirt, hands calloused in the same way, hearts tethered to the rise and fall of seasons. He could tell the week of summer by the scent of the cantaloupe, the angle of the sun by the gloss on a pepper’s skin. College had been an option, once. He’d even driven up to Athens, looked around, but the roads pulled him back—dusty, familiar, humming with cicadas and memory.

Each morning, he’d unload from the flatbed, arrange the produce in soft pyramids, and nod at the passing cars. Sometimes a child would pick a peach and ask if it tasted like sunshine. “Only if you eat it with your eyes closed,” he’d say, smiling. And they always did. The stand was more than commerce—it was tradition, a prayer offered in tomatoes and corn, a place where time moved slow and sweet, like honey on a biscuit.

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