Behind the house in Zone 6 there was a peach tree my mother grew from a stone. You plant the whole heart of the fruit and wait, she said, and waiting was the part she was good at. It fruited small and hard and too sour for anyone but us, who knew no better and loved it.
Under that tree, when I was seven, we buried a shoebox. My father had just left for good, taking the blue suitcase and the good radio, and my mother would not cry where I could see. So instead she made a ceremony. Into the box went a photograph, his old work gloves, a note she folded so tight I never read it, and one of my baby teeth she had kept in cotton wool. We give the bad year to the tree, she said. Let it eat it and grow us something sweet. We patted the soil flat. The tree, I decided, would carry it for us.
The tree grew. So did I, and away, to a flat in Braamfontein with no ground of my own, only pots on a balcony that the wind bullied.
When my mother passed and the house was sold to strangers, I went back once before the papers were signed. The new people were kind. They let me stand in the yard. The peach tree was huge now, older than my grief, dropping sour fruit no one gathered.
I asked if I could dig, just there, just once. They must have seen something in my face, because they said yes and looked away.
The box had gone soft and dark, half returned to soil. The gloves were gone, the photo a pale ghost. But the note had survived, folded still, and the tooth in its cotton, small and stubbornly white. I did not unfold the note. Some things you keep by not reading. I filled the hole and pressed it flat with my two hands, the way she taught me, and left the sweetness in the ground where it was planted, growing something for strangers now, who did not know to love it sour.