Ripe, glowing in the sun: peaches on the windowsill. Pick them up, nest the furry spheres in your palms. Now place all the peaches in a pottery bowl, in the embrace of fired earth, and from a shrilling kettle pour boiling water over, occasionally tapping the fruit under. Pause, count the seconds, then run cold water over fruit. The blanching done, pick up a cooled peach. Catch and draw its seamless canvas skin against a blade and peel it off like a stocking. Cleave each yielding fruit. As the halves tumble, the knife rasps against the pit. Dislodging the hard nut from its fleshy home, read its grooves and points with your fingertips, then discard. A cut glass bowl stands waiting: smooth within, sharp without, light captured in its facets. Let your fingers explore its prickly constellations. Now take up a tender peach half. Your left hand holds, your right hand slices. Left hand holds while right hand cuts slices curvy as fish and as slippery, too. In the bowl, crimson-edged yellow crescents begin to layer. Peach by peach, left hand holds, right hand slices. Peach by peach, slice after slice, slip, plop, sluice of juice. Slice after slice. Left hand holds, right hand slices, slices, until all the peaches are cut. Now take an orange and a lemon and pierce their leathered skins. With thumb and forefinger, squeeze a quarter of each one over the peaches: inhale citrus as you expel the juice. Then stir, and your hand learns the give and density of peaches. Like the knife, the spoon’s an exploratory device. With both hands, take up the laden bowl and leave the peaches to chill. Relieved of fruited weight, your wrists and hands go limp. Then they tingle with life.