This one’s pretty easy. Equal parts depitted peaches and sugar, blend ’em, then pass ’em through a chinois and you’re good to go. Nope, no heat, ding dong. I try to use heat less and less with any syrups for the bar. It gives fruit that strange stewed flavor. Hey, if you like it, you do it.

So one part depitted peaches, one part sugar, by weight. Something like this:

500 Grams Depitted Peaches

500 Grams Sugar

Blend

Strain

This’ll make a quart, which at home will last a long time. You may want to dial it all back a bit unless you’re very fond of peach syrup or throwing a shindig.

As a kid, I owned a battered copy of James and the Giant Peach and read it over and over along with a few other Roald Dahl books. It’s been some time since I’ve gone over it. I do remember something, I don’t know, creepy? about it. The illustrations were disturbing. There was just a strangeness about it, perhaps an element of Grimm’s fairy tales to the whole thing. Children’s books normally shied away from death but in James and the Giant Peach the two mean aunts get fucking squashed. The centipede always bugged me out a bit maybe because I saw a lot of them in this old country house where I grew up. They’re not cuddly creatures and they’re quite large, not something you want to touch. That old place was full of bugs. The basement was nightmarish, a dank, dark, cold mausoleum of stone. Just like any horror movie, you entered through a hatch. There were no stairs. Small windows in the corners letting in a smidgen of light but mostly illuminating the terrifying black spiders crawling about on their webs. A truly horrible place.

Outside wasn’t much better. Lots of bees, the sweet honey and bumble varieties. Harmless unless enraged at a small child throwing a rock through their hive. But also the warrior breeds, the wasps and yellow jackets who excelled at using their stingers which felt like electric shocks and could zap you multiple times without dying. Fields of tall grass were alive with grasshoppers, if you managed to catch one you’d feel their powerful hind legs springing against the inside of your palm and when you let them free they left a strange brown spittle behind. The big garden spiders built webs between anything they could, an utter fascination to watch them spin up and encase a wriggling cricket, they were out in the open, these long legged ambassadors of death, but others lurked in the woodpile, the huge, furry, quick legged wolf spiders. In peak summer, during the day, the deerflies and horseflies circled above, awaiting any moment to drop in, take a bite out of my skull, and leave a massive welt. Black flies and another type of flying insect aptly nick named “No-See-Ums” aimed mostly for the corners of the eyes, the ear orifices, nostrils, and any open mouth. At night it was mosquito time. Swarms of them. The worst ones of all because even if you caught them in the act and gave them a good swat they’d leave a blood smear, a reminder of their true task to drain you of your precious blood and deposit eggs inside you.

The champions of the night were the bats flitting about and gobbling mosquitoes like popcorn. It was dark as pitch out there. No streetlights, no city illuminance to pollute the sky of its millions of stars. The bats would swoop through all of this. Darting to and fro, the air thick with their presence. Turning on a porch light would bring in all the six legged creatures gross, fuzzy moths especially. In early June, mayflies would literally coat the screens of windows and the entire front side of a screen door. They’d be there for days and then just wilt off and die, leaving their clinging, empty carcasses. There was no need to clean them off because some night creature always did. Delicious, easy snacks for the birds, mice, and weasels.

We had a pond full of leopard and giant bull frogs and these weird mud guppies that my parents would find in the garden and return back to the water. On summer nights they released a cacaphony of sound interrupted by the occasional hoot of an owl and the murderous death wails caused by a fisher cat out there in the darkness. Not a cat at all but a weasel, the fisher was something we always heard but never saw. The screams did not issue from the fisher itself but rather from its favorite prey, rabbits, who let loose a blood curdling shriek like that of a small child when they died.

Like other fruits in the short Vermont growing season, peaches were a momentary part of this natural kaleidoscope. The drawn out cicada melodies in deep summer, ringing in the stifling humidity as we munched from a bucket of fresh picked, recently washed peaches on the back patio, the juice dripping down our chins, our hands sticky, the odd fuzz of them we pondered for a moment. The deeply pocked pits thrown into the yard to be discovered by some entity, an immediate procession of ants, and then later snatched by something else, some critter we had never seen or heard of before. We washed our faces and hands with the garden hose, taking a drink of the ice cold well water before threatening the others with a spray down and watching them run off in mock fear only to come circling back through the strong sunlight. Barefoot. The iridescent bodies of Japanese beetles on the rhododendron leaves. Earthworms in the yard after a thunderstorm.