The Orchard Year

The letter came on the twentieth of December, in a long cream envelope from a law office in Sparta, Michigan, and Mara read it standing in the hallway of an apartment building in a city a long way from any apple tree, with her coat still on and the snow melting off her shoulders onto the mat.

Re: Estate of Marguerite A. Velde. Margo Velde, it said, had died on the second of December, at the age of eighty-four, at her home on Ten Mile Road. Under the terms of her will, her real property, consisting of forty acres of orchard land, a farmhouse, outbuildings and equipment, known as Velde Orchards, together with its operating accounts and liabilities, passed to her great-niece. There followed Mara's full name, spelled correctly, which almost nobody managed.

Mara read it three times, and then sat down on the stairs.

Great-aunt Margo. Mara had seen her perhaps six times in her whole life: a tall, weathered, white-haired woman in a barn coat, with enormous hands and a voice that could carry across a forty-acre block, who had come to two family weddings and a funeral and stood at the edge of each of them looking as if she would rather be outdoors. And once, when Mara was nine, a whole week in the orchard in September, sent there by her parents during a bad year at home. Mara remembered almost nothing of that week except the smell. Apples on the ground, sweet and winey and brown. Woodsmoke. Diesel. Wet grass in the early mornings. And Margo, handing down a red apple from a ladder, saying, "That's a Spy. Best apple in Michigan. Don't let anybody tell you different."

After that there had been a card every Christmas, in a big square hand, with a five-dollar bill in it until Mara was twenty and nothing but a line or two after that. Hard frost in May. Good crop of Spies anyway. Lost the old Jonathans to fire blight. Planting Honeycrisp, God help me. Still here. Mara had kept them all, without quite knowing why, in a shoebox.

At the bottom of the letter there was a paragraph in a different tone, as if the lawyer had written it himself and not his clerk.

I should tell you plainly that the orchard has not been profitable for several years, and that there is an operating loan of $180,000 with the farm credit office, secured on the land, due in full on December 15, 2023. Mrs. Velde was aware of this when she made her will. She asked me to give you the enclosed, and to tell you that she did not expect you to keep the place, only to give it one honest year before you decided.

The enclosed was a key on a loop of baling twine, and a note card in the big square hand.

Mara. The book is on the kitchen table. Start in January. M.