The country gentleman took to the orchard, clasping his pruning shears, as he had nearly every day of his life. Lately, he had missed a few days of work. There was a lot of catching up to do. Really he just missed this, the feel of cold steel in his hands, the sound of the snapping of branches.
He'd spent weeks in the hospital recovering from a bout of pneumonia he caught during the cold and damp days of early spring. Then he had to have his throat stretched, a ritual he knew well, repeated often since he swallowed lye as a six-year-old. That procedure went sideways, and Dorothy found him laying on the floor, half alive, at least that's what she told folks. Bill knew better. He told the paramedics just to put him back in bed.
The paramedics begged to differ.
It's always something when you're 86, and you are the Lord of the Manor, so much to do, so little time. He was gentle with the trees, quietly snapping of branches, listening to the birds chirping in between sharp shots from the bird canon. It was a great day to be alive. Heck any day is a great day to be alive when you're 86.
Bill looked up from his busy work and watched two puppies wrestling in the dirt. They were visitors to the farm, invited with their owners, two city folk whom his son brought onto the farm for a short stay. His smiled broadly, remembering the time when his own dogs had the run of the place. There are no dogs on the farm these days, though he hoped that one day his son Doug would come home with one, maybe a Black lab. He liked Black Labs. They were strong, and loyal, a bit stupid, but the perfect farm dog.
Slowly, Bill ambled over to the visitors who were sitting on the 200 year old porch of the farm where he had raised his family. Now his son, Doug, and his family populated the place. Bill and Dorothy had taken up residence in a smaller dwelling on the lip of the acreage. Not too far he couldn't keep an eye on things, but not too close to be bothered by all the commotion created by his big unruly family.
Things hadn't been right on the farm for weeks. There was a pall, a sadness, that engulfed the place, made worse on rainy days. One of the flock, a mother, earned her wings months earlier, leaving her children and husband.
Life is cruel. Wolfie, as Doug called his daughter-in-law, had been taken in a cruel manner by a cancer. She was only 45. She died earlier in the spring, but her presence was felt everywhere, and the sadness was palpitating, and excruciating.
In her final hours, she worried what would happen to her lovely young daughters.
In the end, she signed the papers.
There was no question that the children would live here on the farm.
It was, as Doug and Theresa kept telling them, their forever home.
Bill stood on the porch and talked about life on the farm, about how he had once been not just a farmer, but also a farmer-politician. He shook his head when talk turned to modern day politics. He wished for the days of Bob Welch, the old style lawyer-politician who used to come and sit at his table and have a jaw.
Those days are gone, the days when politics were gentle, and not filled with dogma and rage.
It made Bill tired, this talk, and he said his goodbyes.
"Down the road, you know, they have nice apricots," he said, touching the brim of his hat. "I imagine they're dear."
The visitors made a note of it.
A few minutes later, Bill's wife, Dorothy, turned up in her silver car. She stopped, never getting out, and chatted with the visitors who had come from away. One of the visitors told her that she'd grown up around these parts, on a farm down the way. Dorothy was delighted to learn that the visitor's aunts and uncles had attended the same schools as she had. She shared her memories, and many other tales from kinder years, and then she snatched up Bill to take him home for lunch.
Over at the barn, in the scorching noon day sun, Doug was conferring with his childhood friend, Chris and his wife Janet, who were helping bring in the harvest of newly ripened nectarines. As Janet pressure washed the baskets, Doug and Chris were trying to figure out how to get the tractor going.
Then the phone rang. It was Theresa who was standing beside her van on a country road watching it spout steam.
She'd had a helluva time. No cell service at the camp down the road where she had taken the kids for a mid-summer holiday.
Theresa was on her last nerve. She was still recovering from weeks off the job, after an elderly dementia patient had cracked her ribs in the elevator of the long-term care facility where she worked. And she wondered if her heart would ever heal after the death of Wolfie.
The girls kept her going. She needed to be strong for the them. They were just kids, starting out in life, and missing their mom like crazy. It was horrifying to consider that Wolfie would never walk them down the aisle, or see her own grandchildren enter the world. That job now fell to Theresa.
It was up to Grammie to carry on, make the sandwiches, dry the tears and braid their hair.
Doug told her everything would be fine. They had broad shoulders.
At dinner, the guests put on a feed of steak and shrimp to thank the couple for their hospitality. The kids were still up at camp, under the watchful eyes of their aunts and uncles, who had also taken cabins where they could escape their problems for a week.
Theresa was grateful for the respite, and for a few glasses of Peller wine, out of a big box.
She settled in a chair overlooking the orchard, and put her feet up.
It was good to talk to adults, and let her guard down. Her eyes began to water, darting back and forth.
"I can't watch another young person die," she said. "I just can't."
It was nice to tuck into a steak made by company, and change the subject even for a few hours.
Doug and Theresa reminisced about the good old days just after high school and told the visitors about how they had met and married when Theresa was just 18.
Over the years, the couple watched the marriages of their friends and family falter, but they were still solid. They had raised four strapping boys on this farm, watched over Doug's parents, and welcomed nine grandchildren.
They had planted and pulled up grape vines, cherry and peach trees, on the whims of the weather and the tender fruit market, and they had kept this farm going through good times and all out catastrophes.
Life on the farm was like that: unpredictable. It made for few vacations, but a lot of good stories.
In February, on their 40th anniversary, Theresa told the visitors, they planned to renew their vows.
One day, they hoped to retire, maybe buy a nice trailer and park it in another corner of the farm, and rent the place to another generation of farmers.
The boys weren't natural farmers, she said. It takes a special kind of person to put up with all the nonsense.
But that's a discussion for another day.
The next morning, Doug arose up at the camp, kissed his wife goodbye and headed back to the farm to start another day. There were nectarines to pick, tractors to fix, contracts to negotiate.
In a week, he would turn 60, a little worse for wear, but generally in good health.
Well, maybe the smoking was an issue, and the Parkinson's was a pain, especially when he tried to take photos of his grandkids.
His birthday would be like any other day, though he'd probably kick off a couple of hours early and take the family out for a big messy dinner at the local. He'd have a couple of pops, and more smokes than he needed, and head for bed.
Then he'd get up and do it all again.
As we bundled the pups in the back of the Subaru to return to our reality, I turned to Scott.
"I wonder if people realize what goes into that basket of peaches they buy at the store," I said to him. "All that blood and sweat equity, and love and sadness. Maybe if they did, they'd buy local."
Then we drove up the road to Bill and Dorothy's and presented them with a basket of apricots.
Comments
Post a Comment