Read aloud — generated voice
She grew fruit made of glass, and for eleven years everybody said it was the most beautiful orchard they had ever seen.
The Orchard
The trick was in the care. Glass fruit does not bruise. It does not fall early or go soft on one side or split in the rain. You can hold it up to the light and turn it and there is nothing in it that has gone wrong, because there is nothing in it at all.
Visitors came from three valleys over. They photographed it. They said, how do you keep it so perfect, and she said, I never let it ripen, and everybody laughed because they thought it was a joke about gardening.
The Seed in the Drawer
She had one real seed. She had had it since she was nineteen. She kept it in a drawer in the kitchen, wrapped in a handkerchief, and every spring she took it out and held it and thought about the ground.
A real seed can rot. That is the entire problem with real seeds. It can go into the earth and simply not come up, and then you have to stand in your garden in June knowing you tried.
Eleven springs. Eleven handkerchiefs, folded and put back.
Perfection is not a high standard. It is a hiding place with very good lighting.
The Storm
The storm came through in October and took the orchard down in about forty minutes.
She stood at the window and watched eleven years of flawless fruit come apart on the stones, and the sound it made was not the sound of loss. It was the sound of a thing that had never been alive being told so, loudly, all at once.
In the morning she went out with a broom, and then she stopped, and put the broom down, and went inside and opened the drawer.
She planted it in the wet ground in the wreckage, with no ceremony, in her nightgown, in the cold.
It might not come up. She knows that now the way you know your own name.
She planted it anyway. That is the story.