It’s not about the peaches. Or the plums, the pluots, and the nectarines we sell. It’s about people. And why they come. And why my family has returned to farming. This has surprised me most about the farmers’ markets: many folks aren’t here for the fruit. They are here to connect to the farmers, to the land, to a lost way of life.

“When I was a kid I climbed plum trees and ate so many it made me sick,” says the old man stopping by our market booth. “Back then orchards were everywhere. Now it’s all houses. I live in town.” He sighs long and deeply and my heart hurts for him.

She puts the peach up to her nose and smells the land behind it. I’ve seen this before, come to know what she will say after this. She’s in her early thirties with a little boy by her side. I have a boy beside me, too. My redheaded son, John, who works the markets with me. “Do you like living on a farm?” She asks John after sniffing the peach. He grins and nods as she touches her own son’s head with longing. “I wish we lived on a farm. We’re in a small apartment.” My heart goes out to her and to the little boy who doesn’t run through orchards ripe with summer fruit. “He plays a lot of video games,” she confesses. As she talks, I sneak extra fruit into her bag for the boy while he sits with his TV screen.

“I live in an orchard,” the homeless man tells me. “I have no one,” he says, and then he breaks down, his shoulders shake with sobs that startle me. “I’m so sorry,” I tell him as he weeps. “I’ll give you some fruit for free. What do you like?” He cries for a moment. Then takes a breath trying to compose himself. “I’m sorry to bother you.” “You aren’t bothering me,” I tell him. “I’m glad you came.” A tear streaks his dirty face. “I have nothing to give you,” he says. “Do you know Jesus?” I ask him. “I read the Bible,” he answers. All the homeless people say this. Something else that has surprised me working with the public at these markets. The homeless reading Bibles, or lying about reading Bibles. “But do you know Him?” I persist. “Jesus is alive and he loves you.” The homeless man looks at me doubtfully. I know what he’s thinking. How could God love a mess like me? “It’s true,” I tell him. “The question is, do you love Jesus? This is what matters,” I say, handing the bag of fruit his way. If this man’s belly is howling with hunger how can he hear me? Really hear me say God loves him?

The rich man buys $24 worth of fruit from John, beaming at my boy. “You’re going somewhere in life,” he tells John, adding a dollar tip to the deal. I’ve heard this before, my son is going somewhere. The successful men, like the gray-haired old women, love John. “It’s good to see a boy working,” these people say. “Nowadays kids waste their lives on the computer.”

Some days I long for more computer fun for John. Around 9:30 a.m. he heads over to the orchard to help his grandma “Oma” we call her, and my son-in-law, Drew, and oldest son, Luke, pick and pack the fruit. By 2:30 p.m., we are off to the market for set-up. We sell from 4-8 or 9 p.m., depending on the day, then return home to unpack the truck, John still hard at work. It’s a lot for a fifth-grader, which he’ll be come August. I worry what to do once school starts. Oma and I really need John’s help, but he’ll have homework and early mornings off to class. A dilemma few families face in California these days: how to balance farm work with school that begins well before Labor Day now.

At the farmers’ markets, many people seem to long more for the farm life they imagine than the fruit they carry home. They want the old days of a humming tractor, the sitting-on-your-back porch-watching-the-crop-grow kind of days. And sometimes there is that. When I’m not too tired at the end of the day, I sit on our porch listening to my dad or brother drive the tractor in the orchard. Both these men work long hours, first at their day jobs, then on the farm evenings and weekends because there isn’t enough money yet in farming for them to just farm.

All of this weighs on me, the farmers’ market customers I’ve come to care about who are hungry for more than peaches, my ten-year-old son who can’t go play with his friends because he has to work, my seventy-one-year-old parents who wear themselves out seven days a week building this walnut and fruit farm for their grandkids with their retirement savings and their last years of life force. Mom grew up with peach-farming parents, and she, like the older people who visit the markets, miss their youth on the farm. Other market customers miss the life on the farm they’ve never had.

Today John and I will load up the truck and deliver fruit to folks. And no longer am I fooled by what we’re doing. It’s not about the peaches, it’s about people longing for a way of life America is losing.

John in the orchard.