Each morning when I wake, I pray for strength. I have to tell you the honeymoon with farming is over. It’s now hard work! Maybe this comes with building any marriage. Any business. Any farm. Blood, sweat, and tears lubricate success, they say.

In May, we were thrilled to sign on with Raley’s supermarkets under their Living Local Farms program. We now deliver our peaches, pluots, and nectarines to a handful of Raley’s and Bel Air stores within fifty miles of our orchards, on top of doing our regular farmers’ markets, and opening a fruit shop on our property.

Thank you to my dear friend Deb Benesh for painting our beautiful sign.

July is the height of our harvest. We’re distributing about three thousand pounds of fruit a week right now, along with cutting, drying, and freezing fruit to market this winter. This all sounds spectacular, but it’s also exhausting. I now understand with every fiber of my being the term, “Making hay while the sun shines.” Here at West Butte Orchards, we call it, “Making Fruit while the sun shines.” We use the sun to dry our fruit. Long, hot, summer days are also needed to ripen our fruit.

There’s so much fruit right now our trees are breaking down. It doesn’t help that we didn’t thin our young orchard in the spring. These trees aren’t even two years old yet and look at them.

Opa (my dad) cut more props for us this past weekend. We use these boards to hold up the overloaded limbs until we can harvest the fruit from the branches. Oma and Scott pick all this fruit. These two deserve an award. They are our only pickers unless I join them.

I try not to join them.

The other day I crawled under our splash pluot trees on my hands and knees to get to the lowest branches. “We need to hire little pickers. Maybe we can put Cruz to work,” I told my mom who was picking from the higher limbs. By the time we gathered our load for Raley’s, my arms looked like I’d been in a fight with a bobcat. Now I know why Scott always picks in long-sleeved shirts.

Oma is truly a farmer’s daughter. She loves the trees and helps Scott prop them.

This past Sunday, our only day off, I spent hours peeling and slicing up peaches to freeze for autumn pies. The whole process left me feeling wistful, missing the days in Grandma Anne’s kitchen when my mom, my Aunt Marolyn, my cousins, Kathy, Chrissy, and me would help my grandma can cling peaches. “Women’s work,” my pops would say with a wink when he came in from the orchard. In the 1970’s, Pops farmed eighty acres of peaches. We farm about six acres. Can I just say this at the top of my writing voice… OH MY GOSH! I can’t imagine farming 80 acres of anything!!!

I miss my grandparents so much. Miss their peach farm on Highway 99. Miss my grandma’s warm kitchen.

My only company in the kitchen on Sunday was my mini iPad playing my favorite songs. The boys busied themselves making forts in the living room. Scott worked on putting together new history lessons for his high school students come August, all of us enjoying our air-conditioned house. My grandparents’ house only had a swamp cooler in the living room. We girls dripped sweat, giggled, and gabbed while canning peaches with Grandma. If only I had a time machine. I’d transport myself back there to see if those days were really as good as I remember.

Time passes so fast. I can’t believe the summer’s on a downhill slide. School starts in just a few short weeks.

Not that summer is really summer for us anymore. Summer is now when our family works the hardest. “I feel kind of sad for my kids,” I confided to a friend yesterday morning when he came out to walk the orchard with me and a man we’d like to employ to help us handle our expanding orchard business. I needed an interpreter since I don’t speak Spanish and the orchard man struggles with English. So my Spanish-speaking friend joined us.

“Your boys are blessed,” my friend told me. “They are learning the important things of life out here. They will be good adults.”

“I hope so,” I said. And in that moment my hope felt like a big dog on a leash. I wanted to unleash this dog and let it run. A dog I hoped would come back to me, lick my face, protect me from harm. Not that hope is a pet. Hope is more like a lion. A wild, majestic emotion that might eat you at any given moment.

I’m finding hope unpredictable these days.

And second guessing one’s self stinks.

I confessed to another friend recently, “I’m not sure farming was a good idea. I feel overwhelmed by our farm this year.” I kind of feel overwhelmed by everything right now. Even mowing the lawn feels a bit overwhelming. Normally I love mowing our lawn.

But after we got the Raley’s contract in May, Anna died, and I’ve struggled with feeling overwhelmed ever since.

I keep telling myself to snap out of it, but the snapping’s not working. After bringing home the peaches, I stuffed them in our garage refrigerator and told them all week, “I’m too overwhelmed to prepare you for pies.” Finally on Sunday, I carried them into the house.

Twelve year old John snapped my picture in the kitchen as I lugged them in. Gosh, that box of peaches looks heavy, I thought later when I looked at the photo on my phone.

Peaches are a heavy fruit.

Some of our peaches weigh nearly a pound. Just one peach all by itself. I always feel bad charging a customer $2.00 for only one peach at the farmers’ market so I usually just give them the peach for free if they only want one.

Grief is heavy, too.

And hard work is heavy.

Lord strengthen my frame, I’ve prayed every day since picking up that first box of fruit on June 1st.

God when are you going to strengthen me, I complained the other day. My body aches. I go to bed tired. And wake up tired. Weariness wears on me. I’m tired of being tired, Lord, I’ve been telling Him lately.

After preserving the peaches on Sunday, I took a shower because peach fuzz makes me scratch. I’ve always hated this about peaches, especially when I was a kid working in my grandparents’ orchard. All that itching even in long-sleeved shirts grading peaches.

When I stepped out of the shower after washing off the itch with lovely lavender soap made by my friend Tina Krehe, The Farmer’s Wife, who is our neighbor at the Saturday Farmers’ Market, I decided to check my back for skin cancer. Every few months, I search my body for spots that shouldn’t be there. To my utter shock, what I found on my back on Sunday wasn’t spots, but muscles. That isn’t even my back, went through my mind. Gosh, her back looks strong! 

Like I was seeing someone else’s back in the mirror. A gym worker’s back. And her arms are amazing too!

Wow, she has killer arms! Like killer abs, my son says after hitting the gym. But I haven’t hit a gym in fifteen years.

What’s making you tired is making your strong, whispered into my thoughts after I decided my back looked great in the mirror. My arms looked muscular in the mirror. I’ve had strong arms for more than twenty years from carrying babies for more than twenty years, but now they’re even stronger. Some of our peach boxes weigh forty pounds. I load them in and out of the truck. In and out of Raley’s shopping carts. In and out of our market booth.

As soon as this epiphany hit me: what makes you tired is making you strong, I knew God was speaking to me. Not only did I realize farming was making me stronger, it hit me that grief was making me stronger as well.

It’s like God has dug a new well on my property. A well of mercy and compassion. I’ve been deepened by Anna’s death. Every day I search for a scripture to text to Anna’s mom. Something to strengthen her and give her hope. Today this scripture leaped out at me.

The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. Isaiah 58:11. 

Our dog Nala with Cruz on fruit patrol.

Charles H. Spurgeon once said, “Many people owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.”

I would not say my life is difficult, but without a doubt, my struggles have made me stronger.