Page 24 of Sad Girl Hours
“Excellent,” I say. “I promise our apple-based goods will taste all the sweeter knowing that you picked them for a good cause.”
“I swear,” Saffron says, “you could convince anyone to do anything. It’s a good job you have minimal evil inclinations.”
“Minimal. Not zero but minimal.”
“My word choice was not unintentional. Hey.” She turns back round to face me, both to address me fully and to place a few more apples into my bag. “Speaking of word choice, are our exploits inspiring you to write poetry yet?”
“Oh, definitely,” I say, though I don’t feel fully certain what my angle for the first poem will be – I’m hoping when I start writing I’ll feel differently. “The muse has well and truly struck.”
“Great!” Saffron says. “I’m glad.”
“And you?” I ask. “Is this helping you? Do you feel full of the joys of autumn yet?”
She waits a beat. “Maybe notfull. But it is beautiful. I’ve met a charming black cat, we’re picking apples and the trees – I will admit – are at their prettiest at the minute. Summer has most other things beat, but there’s something about the leaves changing that just…” She trails off. “I don’t know.”
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves…” I quote. “Virginia. Woolf,” I add when she looks confused.
“You and Virginia on first-name terms then?”
“Oh, me and V go way back.”
“It’s beautiful,” she concedes. “I guess it does always come back to this.”
“To?”
She gestures around. “Trees with falling leaves. Apples waiting to either be picked or to fall.”
A poem begins to form in my head. “Excuse me,” I mutter, dropping to the ground, using the tree as a back rest, extracting my notebook and pen from my bag and beginning to furiously scrawl the words on to a blank page.
Isaac Newton claimed to have discovered proof of gravity when an apple fell beside him.
In this orchard, I discovered proof of something else, apples rosy beneath my feet, sweet juice dripping off my chin.
There’s a ripening that happens,
the earth a stone fruit
deepening into a blush as it tilts on its axis,
an occurrence as inevitable and welcome
as the apple falling next to Newton’s feet
when a hearty wind blows on an October day.
Saffron crouches down and reads the words over my shoulder. “What’s this?”
“The start of a poem. It’s probably nothing but we’ll see.”
“Well, I love it,” she declares. “I feel honoured to be watching a master at work like this.”
I scoff, snapping my notebook closed. “Shut up.”
“No, I mean it.” There’s an impish tone underlying her voice. “I’ve never been witness to a bard at work like this. I feel as if I’m peeking behind the curtain of a previously unentered world.”
“And I mean it,” I repeat. “Shut up.” But I’m laughing as I say it, turning to face her.
Her cheeks are round as she smiles, the freckles scattered across her rosy cheeks a little scrunched. There’s a generosity in her gaze, in her general person, that’s really rare. That’s why I’m doing this. She deserves a little generosity back.
