Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

One For the Road

By Carol Mell, 7-09-07

	Anna Sopyn, born in the Ukraine, came to the United States by way of a German labor camp. She still operates her fruit stand by the Rio Grande in Rinconada, New Mexico.

This is my idea of fast food—in late summer you slow down at a wide spot in the road by the Rio Grande called Rinconada, New Mexico and pull in to Sopyn’s Fruit Stand. For a couple of bucks you get a paper bag full of ripe and ripening-by-the-minute peaches fresh from the trees out back by the river. 

Then, because you don’t want to get peach juice in your car but you can’t wait until you get home you stand there by the biggest spool table you’ve ever seen, the one covered with drying gourds, and using your front teeth you pull the blush-colored peel back exposing the ambrosial pulp. It’s no problem if the juice runs down your arm as you bite into this delicacy that tastes just like packaged sunshine. You can wash later. As you dive into your second bite, a pleasure as sinfully delicious as skinny-dipping, you think you know what Eve was thinking.

But what produced this grandest of summer treats is the result of a hard life for Ukrainian émigré Anna Sopyn, 84. She wears her white hair clipped short and her brown skin is leathery from half a century of work along the Rio Grande. She is strong and lithe with eyes as clear and blue as a summer sky. One of her lower teeth is missing and her English is limited. When I ask to take her picture she says, “I too old to smile,” but smile she does when customers stop by to examine her wares. The pears, plums, apricots and peaches are never sprayed. This year the apples weren’t sprayed either so she warns customers they might find a worm.

Coming to New Mexico was the hardest time of her life, she says, even harder than being sent by force from Kiev to labor in Germany. 

“I live over dere in Germany eight years, that’s it,” she explains. “1942. Russia and Germany war. All the young people take to work. I have to go.”

Anna found a Russian husband there, John. In 1951 he got permission to work in this country. At first John worked as a laborer but eventually he was able to buy the 20 acres along the river. They had to pull out a lot of trees before they could plant fruit trees and flowers. Anna planted a large kitchen garden. The children entered school in Dixon and finished in Española before going to college. Only Leon Gaspard, a fellow Russian and artist living in Taos helped them, Anna says. In return she planted a tree where he is buried.

“Just coming here, so hard,” she recalls. “No money for kids. I push kids, ‘Go to school. Get a job. You have to go to college.’ It have to be good for school, it have to be pushed.”

John and Anna’s four children are all grown and live away. One grandchild is named Anna Maria. “They putting my name,” Anna says proudly. John Sopyn died seven years ago. He used to sell to grocers and such but for years the produce, flowers, gourds and dried flower arrangements Anna makes have been sold only at the fruit stand. She is always there.

A neighbor farmer stops by because he’s heard Anna was taken by ambulance to Albuquerque.

“Two weeks ago, I getting a heart attack. I all right now,” she reassures him. “OK. No problem.” Then they talk about crops. “You don’t have peaches this year,” she asks, surprised. “ I got red and white.”

Sopyn’s sons help with the orchards and she has hired a nearby garlic farmer, a young woman, to help her, too.

“The land back there is so abundant,” the garlic farmer tells me.

“I’m surprised she’s out here working after a heart attack,” I say.

“That’s all she knows how to do, is work.”

Anna says she is retiring. Her daughter Valentina is moving back to Rinconada.

“Who will run the fruit stand?” I ask.

“We’ll see what’s happen,” she says. “I hire people to pick apples but no one pick them like me, I pick so good, like a monkey, but I’m getting heart attack. Everybody asking where’s Ms. Sopyn. A hard life, no kids like. It’s a working hard. Some years get hailstorm, you work for nothing. That’s the last year I plant garden. That’s it.”

Anna has three sisters still living in the Ukraine and considered going to see them last winter but decided she was not up to a 16-hour plane trip.

“All right,” she says, “That’s enough stories. OK. That’s it.”

She hands me peaches, I hope to God not the last ones, and somehow I manage to bring these home before I devour them.

You are danged if you do and danged if you don’t but sometimes you get your wish. I wrote this two years ago but just the other day I saw Anna Sopyn, now 86, at her fruit stand. The ripening peaches out back look mighty fine.

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