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WotD: Peach fuzz
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
If you like fruit, Japan is an excellent country in which to live.
I love to eat Wakayama peaches when they are in season.
The peach is a funny fruit because although it kind of looks like an apple, it is covered in soft peach fuzz.
Another funny thing is that peach fuzz is not only found on peaches.
You can also find it on the face of a young boy.
Yes, it’s true young boys’ faces are covered in peach fuzz before they begin to shave.
It’s the very fine, soft, light-coloured hair that begins to grow on a boy’s face as they enter adolescence.
Some boys leave it for a long time, while others start to shave immediately.
Either way, a boy’s first shave is a rite of passage into manhood.
My father was a construction worker, working with middle-aged manly men.
Many of them had been in jail, worked in the Canadian North or served overseas in the military.
They were rough and hard as nails.
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When working with my father as a young high school boy, they would tease me relentlessly about the peach fuzz on my ‘soft, cute little cheeks’ and how ‘those little high school girls must love you.’
Beginning to shave is a big event for a young boy, and I was shamed into it by these sunburned, rough-and-tumble men with skin like leather, full, bushy beards and cigarettes permanently hanging out of their mouths.
Peach fuzz became a symbol of shame until I shaved it off.
Then they teased me because I couldn’t grow a beard. Ha, ha, ha!
I miss those days and working with men like that.
They were rough, stinky and tough as nails, but they were the salt of the earth.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 80.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.