Speaker 1: There is a branch still green to day, that I
Speaker 1: have pruned three times in a single season, or so
Speaker 1: I think. I sometimes catch myself garden snips poised, squinting
Speaker 1: up into the haze of late summer, counting the leaves,
Speaker 1: three broad, one small, before the doubt comes in like
Speaker 1: a tide. Was it this branch or the one opposite?
Speaker 1: Or neither? And I am mixing up my days. Funny
Speaker 1: thing is I've tended these trees for so long I
Speaker 1: could list every twist in their trunks from memory, every
Speaker 1: hollow where a barn owl nested, or where the wind
Speaker 1: once cracked a limb in a midnight storm. Still the
Speaker 1: orchard finds ways to unsettle me, now more than ever.
Speaker 1: Last month, in the coolness of an overcast Monday, I
Speaker 1: was making my first pass through the old King's Apple
Speaker 1: south slope by the tumbled and boundary stones tradition and
Speaker 1: not just habit. That tree's been here as long as
Speaker 1: the orchard fought odd years before I started. This was
Speaker 1: the time for shaping, keeping the crown light. I studied
Speaker 1: each branch's angle, eyeing for the ones that crossed inward
Speaker 1: or bore too much there on the east side. A
Speaker 1: healthy looking offshoot had grown too far out, pressing into
Speaker 1: the space of its neighbor. It boasted a hat of
Speaker 1: shiny leaves and a trio of ripe apples. Nice specimens,
Speaker 1: but crowding is the enemy of good fruit. So I
Speaker 1: cut the branch clean, as one does, pausing to thumb
Speaker 1: a rough patch of bark. Near where the limb joined
Speaker 1: the trunk. There was an odd little knot a scar
Speaker 1: like an eye, and one leaf torn sideways by wind.
Speaker 1: I made a note in my battered journal. On the
Speaker 1: way back to the shed, just briefly for my own memory,
Speaker 1: removed healthy branch east Ky's Apple, three fruit not at base.
Speaker 1: With a week's round of mowing and a school group
Speaker 1: tour coming in, I didn't think much more about it.
Speaker 1: Routine brings comfort. If a man second guesses every cut,
Speaker 1: he lives in a may of small regrets. Seven days on,
Speaker 1: with a thermos and the gentle satisfaction of a deserted orchard,
Speaker 1: I slipped between the rows again. My boots crunched over
Speaker 1: fallen petals and crumbled stone. Passing the old King's apple.
Speaker 1: Something caught not my eye first, but a kind of
Speaker 1: internal pause, a snag in the pattern. I stood there,
Speaker 1: staring up at what should have been an empty patch. There,
Speaker 1: opposite the missing branch jutted another offshoot, leaves arranged like
Speaker 1: little green plates, three tight apples, gleaming in the slanted
Speaker 1: morning light. The very edge of the limb bore a
Speaker 1: ragged tear, mirroring the one I remembered trimming distinctive not
Speaker 1: at the base. I found myself reaching out, tracing the
Speaker 1: bark with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand.
Speaker 1: Had I misremembered, had the cup been here? Not there?
Speaker 1: But my journal said east, and this was west, unless
Speaker 1: I'd written in haste or confused the bearings the twinter,
Speaker 1: the last detail replication was stranger than my muddled mind
Speaker 1: life to allow. I went home, mumbling about false memories,
Speaker 1: making a fresh note mirror branch, found w side, same features,
Speaker 1: and left it at that. Curiosity at my age is
Speaker 1: preferable to worry. But even so, that night, as the
Speaker 1: breeze slipped through my kitchen window, I found myself thinking
Speaker 1: of the orchard's way of slipping a trick beneath a
Speaker 1: familiar routine. If you've spent your life inside a living history,
Speaker 1: you learn to let oddities grow around you, like wild
Speaker 1: violets in the grass. The orchard is not a uniform
Speaker 1: quilt of trees spaced like rows on a paper grid.
Speaker 1: It sprawls over the gentle hills at the foot of
Speaker 1: the sea, the air salted, the weather changeable, flowering times
Speaker 1: shifting year on year. The orchards old local legend makes
Speaker 1: it one hundred seventy years, though nobody trusts the numbers.
Speaker 1: Maps from the eighteen sixties show it half its present size,
Speaker 1: but the boundaries are marked by like and studded stones
Speaker 1: that predate railroad times, even as the world outside grew
Speaker 1: and shrank. Apples, pears, plums, and an occasional suspect cherry
Speaker 1: tree make up the backburn. There are tangles of brambles
Speaker 1: here and there, and at least one stubborn meddler that
Speaker 1: never fruits. The rose do not run straight, but curve
Speaker 1: in and out, following something older than geometry. The ground
Speaker 1: dips and rises, pools of shadows shifting across the grass
Speaker 1: as morning tilts to afternoon. In May, the petals drift
Speaker 1: like pink snow over the benches and old walking paths. Birds,
Speaker 1: especially the blackbirds and jays, have their favorite spots, and
Speaker 1: even local deer seem to prefer one winding lane near
Speaker 1: the northern edge. I've kept watch over this patchwork for decades,
Speaker 1: not alone, though sometimes it feels that way. Before dawn
Speaker 1: or as the last sunset dies in late September, there's Pete,
Speaker 1: my not so young apprentice. He hates when I call
Speaker 1: him that broad shouldered, honest to a fault, with a
Speaker 1: voice that carries through June fog. Pete likes to joke
Speaker 1: that the trees know me better than he does. If
Speaker 1: you leave Sam, they'll have to train me to talk
Speaker 1: to the roots. Most days bring a regular tide of townsfolk,
Speaker 1: some older than the oldest pair, all eager for baskets
Speaker 1: of fruit or a bit of shade. Missus Callahan in particular,
Speaker 1: arrives most tuesdays walking cane, more for style than necessity,
Speaker 1: cheeks like ripe plums. She brings gossip knits beneath blooming boughs,
Speaker 1: and claims her grandfather planted the wrong apple tree in
Speaker 1: the southeast corner by secret design. Tourists come and go,
Speaker 1: especially for the annual blossom festival in spring. They ask
Speaker 1: about the oddities while plum tree sprouts out of a
Speaker 1: pair's roots. Here, why that ancient apple has a patch
Speaker 1: of early yellow fruit while neighbors are weeks behind, Or
Speaker 1: why one bench is always wet. I've become used to
Speaker 1: their questions. I answer as best I can. Some trees
Speaker 1: have old grafts, others are sickly. Climate is strange here,
Speaker 1: micro climates everywhere. Half the time they seem so satisfied
Speaker 1: with my modest shrugs and long winded theories. In the center,
Speaker 1: by the storage shed sits a battered, leather bound caretaker's journal,
Speaker 1: far older than I am. The earliest entries are in
Speaker 1: a hard slanted penmanship, dates fading out a century ago.
Speaker 1: I add my own scribbles, sometimes trivial, Which moa jammed
Speaker 1: or who forgot to leave the gate latched? Sometimes a
Speaker 1: list of wild flowers seen on the southern slope. Other
Speaker 1: caretakers before and after me have left only scattered notes,
Speaker 1: odd fruit, blighted trees, shifting shadows. I've never made a
Speaker 1: habit of reading their pages, beginning to end, too much
Speaker 1: life a waiting outside, I suppose. But these days I
Speaker 1: wonder if I should. If I had become a questioner
Speaker 1: early in life, maybe I'd have become a teacher or
Speaker 1: a surveyor. Instead. My whole craft is patient, noticing the
Speaker 1: kind that makes neighbors assume your content, and a little slow.
Speaker 1: I like to say I'm steady, and most believe it
Speaker 1: peat most of all. The strange thing is a man
Speaker 1: believes himself settled until a single moment breaks that certainty.
Speaker 1: For me, it was the next contradiction in a place
Speaker 1: I thought i'd memorized, down to the soil's smallest pebble.
Speaker 1: Late July, the orchard nearly humming with insect life. I
Speaker 1: was called to prune in the rookery zone, a name
Speaker 1: passed down from my predecessor because crows used to cluster
Speaker 1: there in the nineteen eighties. The trees here are untidy, older,
Speaker 1: heavy limbed, a mess of suckers at their feet. One
Speaker 1: particular apple tree, a legacy of the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: If the fading tag on its trunk spoke true, was
Speaker 1: putting out an especially gnarled branch. It jutted outward, bark,
Speaker 1: twisted limp, leaves marked with a spray of brownish spots,
Speaker 1: as if a careless hand had flicked ink. I took
Speaker 1: my time with it, checking the angle and wrenching it
Speaker 1: off with practiced effort. The branch came down ugly and unmissed,
Speaker 1: but for that peculiar pack, a single splotched leaf at
Speaker 1: the end, and a crook like a shepherd's crook in
Speaker 1: mid curve. Thinking nothing much, I tossed it onto the
Speaker 1: pile by the compost. A week later, rain had made
Speaker 1: its lazy advance and the orchard was slick and full
Speaker 1: of puddles. I returned walking the same row, clipboard in
Speaker 1: hand to check for blight. Pete behind me was checking
Speaker 1: the smaller pears that rimmed the path. That's when I
Speaker 1: saw it. A branch jutting out from a healthy, young
Speaker 1: pear two trees down from the apple, same crooked sea shape,
Speaker 1: same splotched leaf at the tip. The color was off
Speaker 1: pear green, not apple, but the pattern itself down to
Speaker 1: a ridged bump near the base, was unmistakable. I snapped
Speaker 1: a photo on my blotchy phone, then called Pete over,
Speaker 1: what's up, Sam? He squatted by the trunk, peering at
Speaker 1: the branch. That pear's got attitude. Look at the shape,
Speaker 1: Remember last week's apple. The branch I cut heat grinned,
Speaker 1: the one that looked like a witch's finger. You think
Speaker 1: this one's related the very image, But this is a pair,
Speaker 1: he shrugged, plucking at the leaves. You sure you're not
Speaker 1: just seeing connections cause you're tired, he grinned a bit wider, unworried.
Speaker 1: Maybe these trees are showing off for you, or maybe
Speaker 1: you're losing your touch. Unamused, I walked back and forth
Speaker 1: between the stumps Apple here, new branch there. Both faced
Speaker 1: the same direction, more or less. But what caught me
Speaker 1: wasn't just the similarity. It was the fact that the
Speaker 1: new branch wasn't exactly replacing the one I'd pruned. It
Speaker 1: was offset clockwise along the row, as if following the
Speaker 1: ark of the whole orchard. I think it's always clockwise, see,
Speaker 1: I told Pete, but he only laughed, clapping my shoulder.
Speaker 1: Maybe the whole orchard runs on a different kind of clock. Boss.
Speaker 1: That phrase stuck with me. At first. I enjoyed the joke,
Speaker 1: but that evening, before all the sun could dry my boots,
Speaker 1: I jotted a longer note in the caretaker's journal. Apple
Speaker 1: branch sea pruned twisted shape right arrow. Similar appears next
Speaker 1: week on pair one tree, clockwise pattern or oddity check
Speaker 1: again systematic. I won't pretend I leapt at the chance
Speaker 1: to play detective. If you've watched plants for years, you
Speaker 1: learn patience, but distrust patterns that seemed too neat. But
Speaker 1: after that, every time I made a cut or watched
Speaker 1: a branch fall, I tracked and I waited. The curiosity
Speaker 1: had its hooks in. From then on I kept a close,
Speaker 1: even obsessive record. By August's height, I strapped colored tags
Speaker 1: to every branch. I removed each one, marked with a
Speaker 1: date and tree number. I took awkward photos hands trembling
Speaker 1: sun at the wrong angle, but enough to show the
Speaker 1: teltal signs. Every morning, before the volunteers and townsfolk arrived,
Speaker 1: I'd loop around the rose and count here a notch
Speaker 1: where I'd pruned. There a fresh branch or cluster, sometimes
Speaker 1: bearing the same kind of injury or flourish as the
Speaker 1: one gone missing. And every time I plotted it on
Speaker 1: a notepad map a rough sketch, trees numbered in the
Speaker 1: order they wrapped around the shaded rise. It wasn't uniform.
Speaker 1: Sometimes a replacement would skip over three trees or not
Speaker 1: appear till the second or fourth week after the original
Speaker 1: was cut. Once a patch of spotted leaves showed up,
Speaker 1: not as a branch, but as a cluster of fruit,
Speaker 1: unmistakable for the teltial bite mark of a squirrel I
Speaker 1: chased away the previous day. Other times, a removed, blighted
Speaker 1: plum branch resurfaced, not on a neighboring plum tree, but
Speaker 1: on an ancient apple, thin and odd, but still in
Speaker 1: line with the row. The constant was its direction, every echo,
Speaker 1: every mirror, always clockwise, as if the entire orchard ran
Speaker 1: on some unwritten schedule, each event tumbling forward with a
Speaker 1: patient precision. A handful of trees, especially the newest saplings
Speaker 1: or particularly old, brittle trunks, seemed untouched by the dance.
Speaker 1: I logged that too. I started keeping two diagrams, one
Speaker 1: that showed the official orchard as the eye sees it,
Speaker 1: another layered with colored lines and circles, mapping the chain
Speaker 1: of moving features. Every time I voiced a new finding,
Speaker 1: Pete's response was playful skepticism. I guess the pears are
Speaker 1: bared of being pears, he said once after I showed
Speaker 1: him side by side photos. Maybe you should stop pruning.
Speaker 1: See if the whole place decides to put itself together
Speaker 1: like a puzzle, I'd love if any one else noticed,
Speaker 1: I grumbled. But the rest of our small staff, three
Speaker 1: part timers, and an ever changing tide of horticulture students
Speaker 1: only shrugged Orchard always has its odd seasons. Sam, you
Speaker 1: just look deeper than the rest, said one, meaning it
Speaker 1: as a compliment or a gentle rebuke. I couldn't tell.
Speaker 1: It's funny. Nobody wants to find out their world is unstable,
Speaker 1: especially when the stakes are so small. A branch here,
Speaker 1: a blossom there. But I could not drop the thread. Instead,
Speaker 1: I did what any old caretaker would. I dug deeper
Speaker 1: in the walls of journals and archives and in the
Speaker 1: living memory of the town's oldest inhabitants. That was when
Speaker 1: I started raiding the old caretaker's journal in Earnest, searching
Speaker 1: for echoes of what I recorded. The handwriting in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties and thirties was elaborate pages filled with stories
Speaker 1: of frost, drought, and robust harvests beyond prediction. Occasionally I
Speaker 1: found gems north Row first apple swap with green pear
Speaker 1: by the well twenty first May no accounting for taste.
Speaker 1: Nineteen fifty four star pattern blossom e tree gone found
Speaker 1: next fortnight, two trees right, same dewdrop on third petal.
Speaker 1: Still no answer. Even less formal were the personal asides
Speaker 1: nettle patch lost re emerged by the memorial slab no
Speaker 1: use replanting In later years. Some entries simply trailed off
Speaker 1: into size or rye resignation. The orchard is in motion,
Speaker 1: let it dance. I compared every cryptic note with my own,
Speaker 1: then went looking for older wisdom. Missus Callahan knitting and
Speaker 1: spreading stories by the orchard's gait leaned in conspiratorially when
Speaker 1: I asked, oh, the pear blossom weeks, Yes, those. My
Speaker 1: aunt always said that if you napped beneath the biggest
Speaker 1: apple tree and woke before noon, you'd swear the world
Speaker 1: had rearranged. Not just a child's trick. Seems to me.
Speaker 1: You folks who work the rose keep moving the signs round,
Speaker 1: and the trees keep obliging. I wouldn't put too much
Speaker 1: weight on it. Trees know what they know. Old mister
Speaker 1: Haskins from up the lane was a harder nut. It's
Speaker 1: the ground, Sam always said, So something under there magnetic.
Speaker 1: Maybe you dig deep enough and the stones under the
Speaker 1: orchard are set like a clock, each tugging things forward.
Speaker 1: But folk don't like you talking that way. I sat
Speaker 1: with that idea, but wanted facts. I paid a visit
Speaker 1: to the Historical Committee, a haphazard group of well meaning
Speaker 1: towns folk chared by Linda, whose hobby, some say, is
Speaker 1: keeping the notion of history alive in a place that
Speaker 1: wants to forget. Linda, hair up in a careless bun,
Speaker 1: produced a battered shoe box of post cards and seep
Speaker 1: your towned festival maps. These are from the Blossom festivals,
Speaker 1: mostly nineteen fifty and after, but a few older ones.
Speaker 1: She smiled, seeing my attention. People circle the biggest, flashiest
Speaker 1: tree each year and write its name on the back.
Speaker 1: See if you can spot a pattern. I sorted them
Speaker 1: by date, scanning for clues. Some named the same apple
Speaker 1: tree for years, then abruptly skipped to a plum, then
Speaker 1: a pair on the opposite end. Even the photos blurred
Speaker 1: inexact documented not just changes in tree size or health,
Speaker 1: but in the actual geography from year to year. In
Speaker 1: one photo, the well bent pair stood behind a split rock.
Speaker 1: Two years later it was the apple, or so the
Speaker 1: note claimed. Most townsfolk, when asked, dismissed my curiosity with
Speaker 1: a cheerful tolerance. That's just how it is with the orchard,
Speaker 1: said miss Wells, the school teacher. Every festival, it seems
Speaker 1: the children get lost in a different turn. With each
Speaker 1: new line of questioning, I began to realize how much
Speaker 1: of the Orchard's history rotated, not just through its living matter,
Speaker 1: but through our memories and stories. Still that didn't satisfy
Speaker 1: the cold, practical grounds keeper inside. I started tracing a
Speaker 1: larger map from memory, overlaying each finding with the older
Speaker 1: photos and scribbled diagrams, leaves, blossoms, even the small clusters
Speaker 1: of stones. What emerged was hardly random. Week after week,
Speaker 1: the details, the ones any one would notice if they
Speaker 1: looked closely, moved in a deliberate arc, always moving forward,
Speaker 1: never to the left, and never twice in the same place.
Speaker 1: Pattern or not. I needed more evidence. I threw myself
Speaker 1: into the hunt for a master explanation, something to tie
Speaker 1: together the living sprawl of this place. Linda had more
Speaker 1: than just postcards she'd inherited via some labyrinthine root, a
Speaker 1: box of blueprints and old festival programs in Among the
Speaker 1: faded pages were maps drawn in colored ink, showing now
Speaker 1: vanished beds of daffodils and scattered rose bushes. What caught
Speaker 1: my eye was a single, more recent page, nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 1: It said, in neat script, the orchard divided into twelve sections,
Speaker 1: radiating out like hours on a clock. At the center,
Speaker 1: a curious note hub, tree, origin, anchor. I compared this
Speaker 1: to my own living office map, and with journal entries passed,
Speaker 1: the echoes startled me. Major fruitings rotated from sector to sector.
Speaker 1: On the three of the clock face, the first apple
Speaker 1: blossoms one spring. Two years later, the same richness appeared
Speaker 1: at the five, and so on the pear harvest earliest,
Speaker 1: then latest, then returning in a spiral. A new theory
Speaker 1: took hold, not simply odd branches or misplaced fruit, but
Speaker 1: the entire pattern of bloom and shadow, of health and
Speaker 1: memory was in motion, slow, patient, swirling, like the hands
Speaker 1: of a gentle old clock. I spent nights hunched over
Speaker 1: the caretaker's journal, cross checking each clue against the calendar.
Speaker 1: I came to notice that the years when the pattern
Speaker 1: seemed to wobble from storms, drought, or even sabotage coincided
Speaker 1: with abrupt changes among the town's routines or festival roots.
Speaker 1: The hardest proof to ignore came at dawn, with the
Speaker 1: dew silvering the grass. Walking from north to east, I
Speaker 1: saw how the air grew cooler, the smell of blossoms changed,
Speaker 1: and the direction of shade shifted not with the rising sun,
Speaker 1: but with the hidden rising them of the orchard itself.
Speaker 1: A spot that once struck me with spicy winter green
Speaker 1: in May was suddenly honey sweet, like a pair left
Speaker 1: too long in sun. I even started charting where the
Speaker 1: morning dew settled, not just on grass, but on the
Speaker 1: stone benches and weathered boundary markers. Every week, the brightest
Speaker 1: shimmer trailed clockwise across the rows, shifting like the ark
Speaker 1: of a silent sundial. Every detail pointed to something deeper.
Speaker 1: The orchard itself, as an organism, not merely plants, but
Speaker 1: lived memory and communal expectation, was quietly, persistently shifting itself
Speaker 1: underneath our feet. It was a slow realization, and not comfortable,
Speaker 1: that my steady world, ruled by calendar and hand, was
Speaker 1: in fact afloat on a river. None of us could
Speaker 1: see that one could move forever in this place and
Speaker 1: always find the season the features. The very day's mood
Speaker 1: had slid one notch ahead. Or perhaps that we moved
Speaker 1: and the orchard kept its self still in some truer time.
Speaker 1: When at last I voiced this, not without embarrassment, to Pete,
Speaker 1: he whistled low, no longer laughing. Maybe it's not the
Speaker 1: tree's moving, boss. Maybe it's us following whatever keeps the
Speaker 1: orchard turning. Or maybe I said, quietly, the orchard itself
Speaker 1: is keeping time, and we're just its hands. That convinced
Speaker 1: me the anomaly was not an oddity, not a trick
Speaker 1: of memory or biology, at least not solely, but a persistence,
Speaker 1: an underlying order, running wider and older than a single person,
Speaker 1: like a living clock, a clock that never told the
Speaker 1: same time twice, but always pointed forward. Still, there was
Speaker 1: more to know, and the knowledge, rather than closing my curiosity,
Speaker 1: only made it grow. I spent more nights than I'd
Speaker 1: care to admit, hunched on a camp stool just outside
Speaker 1: the old shed, marker pens and diagrams unfurled, the caretaker's
Speaker 1: journal splayed open, with its spine cracking. There's a satisfaction
Speaker 1: that comes from careful notes, a kind of quiet ritual.
Speaker 1: But my certainty crumbled each time a new entry seemed
Speaker 1: to shift. Even as my pen dried, forty years of
Speaker 1: routine couldn't touch what the orchard revealed, and by the
Speaker 1: first days of September, the boundary between my observation and
Speaker 1: the orchards strange patient rearrangement felt blurred at the edges.
Speaker 1: The next step seemed obvious. Pushed the system, test its
Speaker 1: boundaries and see if there were any. One afternoon below,
Speaker 1: a sky filled me with sea haze. I slipped down
Speaker 1: to the patch of ground furthest from the original boundary,
Speaker 1: stones beyond even old man Haskins's favored bench. The plot
Speaker 1: there was bare, just a well of sandy soil and
Speaker 1: a shadow from the tool shed. At four in the afternoon,
Speaker 1: there I carried my experiment, a young fig sapling from
Speaker 1: Pete's own greenhouse, still potted in its black plastic and
Speaker 1: with dirt crumbling from its roots. It was a species
Speaker 1: with no orchard kin, no history among our apples, pears,
Speaker 1: or plums. I pressed it into the ground, tamped the soil,
Speaker 1: pushed a colored tag into its crown, and with a
Speaker 1: feeling half mischief, half solemn experiment, I told Pete, who
Speaker 1: was lugging mulch in the wheelbarrow, let's see how deep
Speaker 1: the orchard's memory runs. He barked a laugh. Been wanting
Speaker 1: to smuggle something weird in here for decades. Watch next week,
Speaker 1: it might be growing tomatoes. Just to spite you, that evening,
Speaker 1: I tucked a card with the date under a rock
Speaker 1: by the sapling's roots. Then, with a superstitious wink at
Speaker 1: the gathering clouds, I locked the orchard gait. For seven days.
Speaker 1: I checked the sapling each morning. Nothing. It looked the same, drooping, defiant,
Speaker 1: a battered transplant, still unsure of its welcome. Then eight
Speaker 1: days later, after one of those autumnal storms that leave
Speaker 1: gullies in the dirt and branches scattered like pick up sticks,
Speaker 1: I returned at dawn to find the fig changed, three
Speaker 1: new branches, leafy, slender, poked from the stem, green as
Speaker 1: the first grass of April. There, clustered among the fresh
Speaker 1: shoots hung three tiny, unmistakably apple shaped fruits, too small,
Speaker 1: too early. My hand hovered over them, unwilling at first
Speaker 1: to touch the leaves closest to the apples were neither
Speaker 1: fig nor apple, something between, with the lobed structure of
Speaker 1: a fig but the downy surface and serrated edge of
Speaker 1: an apple. The branch above held a curiously rough patch,
Speaker 1: like the old knot I'd traced in the King's Apple,
Speaker 1: except now on a species that should not bear it.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a mistake in planting or in memory. It
Speaker 1: was physically impossible. I pulled my phone from my jacket,
Speaker 1: snapping pictures from every angle, feeling an exhilaration more than unease.
Speaker 1: By the following week, the apples vanished, and impossibly three
Speaker 1: globular pears had appeared, instead, matching in size and position
Speaker 1: the latest crop on the nearest rotational tree in that quadrant.
Speaker 1: Pete shook his head, white eyed when I dragged him
Speaker 1: by the collar at noon. So what now, he asked,
Speaker 1: not entirely joking. Cherries next week, I think, I said, quietly,
Speaker 1: not sure if I were speaking to Pete or to
Speaker 1: the orchard itself. It'll do as it always does, It'll
Speaker 1: keep turning no matter what we plant or prune. He leaned,
Speaker 1: in humming low. That fig was yours, But the apples
Speaker 1: and pears aren't you reckon. The orchard steals whatever's new,
Speaker 1: it doesn't steal. I found myself smiling in spite of
Speaker 1: the oddness. It makes everything belong in its own way.
Speaker 1: So if I planted a cactus, I clapped him on
Speaker 1: the back. Let's leave the cacti in the greenhouse for
Speaker 1: every one's sake, he grinned, though some respect, or at
Speaker 1: least honest caution, had crept into his tone. All right, boss,
Speaker 1: I'll just prune what's willing and let the rest look
Speaker 1: after itself. The story, it seemed, was bigger than pruning.
Speaker 1: The orchard didn't resist intrusion. It transformed it, enfolded it,
Speaker 1: and smoothed away anything that didn't match its rhythm. The
Speaker 1: fig would bear what the cycle required, not out of submission,
Speaker 1: but as if it had always planned to the moment
Speaker 1: it took root in our soil. For the first time,
Speaker 1: I began to distrust my own senses. It wasn't only
Speaker 1: the branches that moved, nor the species that were subsumed.
Speaker 1: It was my perception, the ground under my boots, the
Speaker 1: way shadow and sunshine filtered through leaves at an angle
Speaker 1: that felt subtly different day by day, The quality of
Speaker 1: air itself shifted as I walked the length of the rose,
Speaker 1: sense changing not just the expected cut grass and heather,
Speaker 1: but sudden fleeting traces spiced cider, a hint of burnt sugar,
Speaker 1: the buried sweetness of pear. Some days, the orchard's path
Speaker 1: by the west wall fell warmer than the rest, bathed
Speaker 1: in spring before the rest of the property thawed. I
Speaker 1: walked and I wondered. Sometimes as I made my way
Speaker 1: from the newest sapling back toward the old King's Apple,
Speaker 1: I found myself doubting just what my sense of time
Speaker 1: became within the orchard. Memory played tricks. I would start
Speaker 1: beneath the apple tree, only to realize moments later I
Speaker 1: was at the edge of the row, with the overgrown
Speaker 1: meddler or ankle deep in a patch of daisies I
Speaker 1: swore hadn't bloomed in two decades. On an impulse, I
Speaker 1: planted a flag the sort used by surveyors at the
Speaker 1: start of my morning stroll. Yet by the time I
Speaker 1: reached the end, the flag appeared several trees over. Pete
Speaker 1: set to trimming branches simply said, maybe you walked the
Speaker 1: long way round and didn't notice it. But the soft
Speaker 1: alarms in my mind couldn't be silenced. I was no
Speaker 1: longer simply observing a curiosity, I was living within it.
Speaker 1: The more the pattern asserted itself, the more explanations failed me.
Speaker 1: I rang doctor Lincoln, who'd retired from the county horticulture
Speaker 1: departments some years ago. Lincoln had a strong jaw, a
Speaker 1: pronounced limp, and the type of grave dignity reserved for
Speaker 1: those who never take small talk lightly. We sat beneath
Speaker 1: the salmon colored parasol outside his cottage. Orchard. Maps spread
Speaker 1: awkwardly on the patio. I explained as methodically as I
Speaker 1: could the series of rotating anomalies, the fig the branches,
Speaker 1: the moving blossoms. He listened, chin in hand, tapping his
Speaker 1: mug against the table propagation. Lincoln said, at last, someone
Speaker 1: long ago must have bred trees with wild, unpredictable rootstocks.
Speaker 1: Grafting could explain pears and apples swapping branches. Sometimes the
Speaker 1: under stock winds, But you're saying entire features shift, places, shadows,
Speaker 1: even sense, yes, and not gradually. Sometimes overnight, it's as
Speaker 1: if the orchard replaces itself weak to wis, but only
Speaker 1: in one direction. Micro climates you know how the coast works,
Speaker 1: wind tunnels, salt spray, maybe memories the culprit people remembering
Speaker 1: what they want, not what is if so, I pressed,
Speaker 1: then how did the fig bear apples? How did the
Speaker 1: labels in the archives move to match? He grumbled, there's
Speaker 1: no accounting for collective fantasy unless magnetic anomalies. I've seen
Speaker 1: compass needles go haywire at some sites, but never trees
Speaker 1: taking on the personality of their neighbors. I let him use,
Speaker 1: but his explanations grew more strained, and neither of us
Speaker 1: looked satisfied. At last, he said, with a sigh, it's
Speaker 1: an old place. Maybe it's not meant to be solved,
Speaker 1: but stewarded. The locals had their own theories. When I
Speaker 1: asked about the origins, Missus Callahan was matter of fact. Well,
Speaker 1: people always said the orchard was designed as a giant timepiece.
Speaker 1: Founder was obsessed with clocks, used to carry one everywhere,
Speaker 1: wound it at every festival. They say, if you circle
Speaker 1: the orchard at dawn enough times, you'll see the time
Speaker 1: change in the trees. My gran used to tell us
Speaker 1: to walk the loop clockwise in the spring for good
Speaker 1: luck and woe to those who try the other way.
Speaker 1: Festival law ran even deeper than that. I dug out
Speaker 1: a stack of faded pamphlets from the storage shed, programs
Speaker 1: with amateur sketches of apples, badly misspelled recipes, and more
Speaker 1: than one mention of the Clockmaker's Walk, a route along
Speaker 1: the orchard's ring. Townsfolk would process along it during the
Speaker 1: opening day of the festival, bells tied to sticks, children
Speaker 1: zigzagging between the tree rows. The official explanation in the
Speaker 1: pamphlets was simply to bless the harvest by turning with
Speaker 1: the world. Though nobody could say where the tradition started
Speaker 1: or why it had always been done only one way around.
Speaker 1: There were contradictions at every turn. The school teacher mis
Speaker 1: Wells remembered how her class once planted a line of
Speaker 1: crab apples along the northern fence, only to find half
Speaker 1: of them vanished by summer break. The rest bore random pairs,
Speaker 1: and nobody cared. The festival committee, all striped sun hats
Speaker 1: and clipboards, cited an occasion decades past where the parade
Speaker 1: route was mistakenly run in the opposite direction. That was
Speaker 1: the year we lost the blossom contest altogether someone laughed.
Speaker 1: Though whether the contest itself was lost or just the
Speaker 1: winner is a memory nobody could agree on. I pressed Linda,
Speaker 1: our informal historian, for written evidence. She produced a dusty
Speaker 1: folder labeled Oddities, containing magnetic surveys from a university team
Speaker 1: thirty years prior results no statistically relevant anomalies detected a
Speaker 1: pile of contradictory aerial photographs and years worth of festival programs,
Speaker 1: each describing a slightly different orchard layout, the blossom contest,
Speaker 1: the scavenger hunt, the fruit picking shop. Everything rotated. Even
Speaker 1: the order in which the stone benches were numbered changed
Speaker 1: with each generation. I tried, in vain to pin down
Speaker 1: a constant, but between the stories and the records, something
Speaker 1: subtler dawned. Not only did the orchard rearrange itself, but
Speaker 1: so did every one's memory of it. The more I compared,
Speaker 1: the more the stories tangled. People remembered the orchard differently,
Speaker 1: not just in details, but in shape, direction, and even
Speaker 1: which trees came first along the paths. It was as
Speaker 1: if every observer carried inside them a different, slightly rotated
Speaker 1: clock face of the same place. And yet nobody was
Speaker 1: disturbed by this the orchard's rules were simply how it is.
Speaker 1: In candid moments, Missus Callahan said, maybe it's the town
Speaker 1: that spins sam and the orchard keeps track, so we
Speaker 1: won't get too dizzy by mid autumn. I shifted my focus.
Speaker 1: If the phenomenon resisted explanation from without survey, science, folklore,
Speaker 1: maybe its secret was within, encoded in its lay out itself.
Speaker 1: I dug further into the planning blueprints Linder had let
Speaker 1: me borrow. Some were barely legible, creased and smudged, their
Speaker 1: margins littered with calculations and snatches of poetry. On a hunch,
Speaker 1: I took the oldest parchment, a coffee stained survey from
Speaker 1: the orchards founding, and laid it over the same plot
Speaker 1: as the festival parade map. I marked, as best as
Speaker 1: judgment allowed, the sun's path for midsummer and midwinter and
Speaker 1: the three recorded days of the festival. A pattern revealed
Speaker 1: itself on just a handful of dates each year, aligned
Speaker 1: with neither solstice nor equinox, but somewhere in between. If
Speaker 1: you walked the clockmaker's walk in step with sunrise, the
Speaker 1: orchard's tree layout, and the order of visible fruit formed
Speaker 1: a near perfect clock face. Each tree sector, as mapped,
Speaker 1: would brighten in turn as the sun reached it, Circling clockwise.
Speaker 1: For three days, the orchard was tidily locked into a symmetry.
Speaker 1: Then slowly, over weeks and months, the pattern would shift, devolving, drifting,
Speaker 1: until it circled back to alignment the following year. It
Speaker 1: was in keeping with the stories. The blueprints showed faint
Speaker 1: glyphs etched hour markings on the stones that still bordered
Speaker 1: the orchard's edges, Some half buried could only just be
Speaker 1: read beneath lichen and moss, A three, A six, A
Speaker 1: faded nine, beside a crumbled bench. These markers, I realized,
Speaker 1: weren't placed at random, but sketched the face of a
Speaker 1: giant dial across the land itself. In a moment of
Speaker 1: sudden understanding, I revisited the oldest caretaker log books, kept
Speaker 1: in a battered trunk in the shed's farthest corner. Aromatic
Speaker 1: with old leather and apple would polish. Entries ran from
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds to the mid nineteen twenties, a
Speaker 1: ledger of storm damage, pestilence, and prize winning fruit tallies,
Speaker 1: but in amongst the practicalities. The caretakers told stories similar
Speaker 1: to my own. Attempts to rectify misplaced trees, pruning to
Speaker 1: correct and unsightly shape branches tied off to Coax's growth
Speaker 1: in a proper direction. Invariably a pattern emerged. Each effort
Speaker 1: to fix or disrupt the perceived order, moving a sign,
Speaker 1: planting a tree out of pattern, grafting a branch from outside,
Speaker 1: bore fruit for a time, then vanished or was absorbed
Speaker 1: the orchard itself quietly restoring the pattern as if nothing
Speaker 1: had happened. A story from nineteen twenty two stood out.
Speaker 1: A boy switched the labels on two trees during festival week,
Speaker 1: and two weeks later the fruit switched places instead matching
Speaker 1: the swapped labels. Imposed plans were dissolved. The orchard's own
Speaker 1: rotation always prevailed. It struck me suddenly and sharply that
Speaker 1: the orchard remembered changes not just in the plants, but
Speaker 1: in every act and intention applied to it. Every attempt
Speaker 1: to dictate its direction was translated and enfolded, re expressed
Speaker 1: in the turn of its living lif a memory that
Speaker 1: didn't just record, but remade everything offered. I could see
Speaker 1: how over decades, perhaps centuries. New stories, new trees, and
Speaker 1: new people entered, became a part of the turning and
Speaker 1: left again. The orchard's pattern was persistent, yet not rigid.
Speaker 1: It had the flexibility to absorb change and the quiet
Speaker 1: force to return to its arc. Each disruption, each act
Speaker 1: of care or neglect, each rotation became part of its chronicle.
Speaker 1: The branches moving clockwise weren't just a quirk, but the
Speaker 1: visible surface of something deeper, a living system for the slow,
Speaker 1: ongoing translation of memory and time. For weeks I meditated
Speaker 1: on this idea. Then came the day of the festival,
Speaker 1: overcast but dry, the air full of the scent of
Speaker 1: cider and trampled grass, the chatter of townsfolk and visiting
Speaker 1: families swirling between booths set up along the main drive.
Speaker 1: This year, at my request, the committee restored the Clockmaker's
Speaker 1: walk to the morning's schedule, Part nostalgia, part curious experiment.
Speaker 1: Before dawn, I took my own walk alone, Beginning at
Speaker 1: the easternmost stone. The three on the imagined clock aligned
Speaker 1: with sunrise. Each marker on the path each hour corresponded
Speaker 1: to a sector of the orchard, and as I stepped
Speaker 1: over each boundary, a transformation, real or imagined occurred. The
Speaker 1: scent of blooms shifted, and with each new tree, a
Speaker 1: different variety of fruit glistened in the half light. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't just the plants that changed. Passing from stone
Speaker 1: to stone, I felt something ripple beneath my experience, A
Speaker 1: sudden memory not my own, the laughter of a child
Speaker 1: running ahead on little legs, a faded tune hummed by
Speaker 1: an old woman weaving garlands near the six, the uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: itchy brand of a woolen uniform under the nine, an
Speaker 1: echo from some long gone caretaker tidying fallen branches. At twelve.
Speaker 1: The air was thick with fragments of story, glimpses that
Speaker 1: seemed borrowed from previous walkers, every footstep stirring up the
Speaker 1: sediment of the orchard's long history. As I circled and stopped,
Speaker 1: the very ground beneath my shoes felt briefly both present
Speaker 1: and layered, as if I was walking on the superimposed
Speaker 1: tracks of all who'd circled before. I paused at the
Speaker 1: midnight position. A subtle dip beneath two ancient apples, just
Speaker 1: as the sky brightened behind the sea Miss Bellaney arrived,
Speaker 1: her gait measured, scanning the blueprints she'd brought tucked under
Speaker 1: her arm. Doctor Lincoln soon joined, adjusting his cap against
Speaker 1: the sharp breeze. The three of us stood quietly on
Speaker 1: the grass. I voiced what felt in that moment, newly inevitable.
Speaker 1: The orchard isn't marking hours like a clock. It's keeping memories.
Speaker 1: Each rotation presses a new story into the surface and
Speaker 1: wipes some of the old away, just enough to make
Speaker 1: space for more. Miss Blaney gave a wry smile. So
Speaker 1: so each season it isn't just the trees that change,
Speaker 1: but the stories we tell by walking them. My great
Speaker 1: grandfather always said he planted one tree but remembered ten.
Speaker 1: Maybe the trick was he never mourned the things he forgot,
Speaker 1: He just walked them into the next round. Doctor Lincoln knelt,
Speaker 1: brushing away moss from the twelve stone, a palimpsest, not
Speaker 1: just overwriting, but renewing. With each cycle, the record grows deeper,
Speaker 1: receding just far enough for the new layer to shine.
Speaker 1: I thought of my endless notes, the lines and circles
Speaker 1: in my diagrams, the years spent nudging branches and tracing
Speaker 1: the lines in trunks. We don't just tend the orchard.
Speaker 1: We synchronize with it, every act of care, every harvest,
Speaker 1: every error translated into its rhythm. It's not enforcing time,
Speaker 1: but synchronizing memory, ours and its own. Miss Bellaney added softly,
Speaker 1: We're not outside it, are we. We're as much a
Speaker 1: part of the rotation as any plum or stone. Maybe
Speaker 1: that's why the pattern persists, because we keep adding to it,
Speaker 1: consciously or not. The three of us stood beneath the
Speaker 1: blossoming boughs, silent. As the morning grew, the procession of
Speaker 1: festival goers soon wound down the rows, tables laden with
Speaker 1: pastries and jam. The clockmaker's walk became a ribbon of
Speaker 1: small feet, laughter, and the lazy ringing of cowbells. Some participants,
Speaker 1: children mostly skipped ahead, inventing short cuts, snatching at the
Speaker 1: low hanging apples, returning again and again with new treasures,
Speaker 1: as if gathering the day's memories for later. I realized
Speaker 1: then that seeking a solution had always been beside the point.
Speaker 1: The orchard's clockwise miracle wasn't a puzzle in need of explanation,
Speaker 1: but a pattern in need of participation. The movement, the memory,
Speaker 1: and the rhythm. These were the answers the orchard had
Speaker 1: always offered in the language of transformation. In the days
Speaker 1: that followed, I shuffled through the orchard, not with diagreon
Speaker 1: rams or tags, but a simpler attention. I scrawled my findings,
Speaker 1: every twist, anomaly, recurrence into the caretaker's journal with a
Speaker 1: lighter hand. I no longer asked why does it do this? Instead,
Speaker 1: what is the orchard inviting me to notice? The answer
Speaker 1: was never simple, but always generous. I let go of
Speaker 1: my drive for answers as I found myself working alongside
Speaker 1: Pete and the festival volunteers, tending to the summer's last
Speaker 1: fruits and preparing the ground for winter mulch. Instead of skepticism,
Speaker 1: I shared my observations, inviting newcomers to mark the rotating shapes,
Speaker 1: or simply to listen for the secret sound of memory
Speaker 1: turning beneath the grass. The echo of each caretaker seemed
Speaker 1: to walk beside me the present moment, laired atop their routines,
Speaker 1: all memories gently synchronized in the slow turn of the
Speaker 1: clock face one breezy evening, as the orchard glowed with
Speaker 1: the yellows and reds of early autumn. I paused beneath
Speaker 1: the ti tree that had just burst into improbable blossom.
Speaker 1: The petals caught a beam of setting sunlight, swirling in
Speaker 1: a wind that felt borrowed from some earlier season. I
Speaker 1: turned my face upward, and a wonder rose, familiar but fresh,
Speaker 1: as if the orchard were remembering both itself and me,
Speaker 1: keeper of its rhythm. Just for an instant, a young
Speaker 1: family trotted down the row, laughter scattering like birds from
Speaker 1: the grass. The children dashed to the nearest tree, their
Speaker 1: baskets flying, arguing over whose apple was biggest, or which
Speaker 1: tree was winning this year's secret game. I watched as
Speaker 1: the branches above shifted minutely, a flower giving way to
Speaker 1: fruit in the span of a heart's beat, or so
Speaker 1: I thought. I did not reach for an answer, only
Speaker 1: the moment. If the orchard is keeping time, what is
Speaker 1: it remembering? And for whom? I wondered aloud, barely louder
Speaker 1: than a whisper Among the apple leaves, The children's laughter
Speaker 1: stitched itself into the day. I could almost feel their
Speaker 1: actions pulled gently into the rhythm, ready to resurface one
Speaker 1: rotation from now for the next set of wondering eyes.
Speaker 1: The orchard is not a problem to solve, and perhaps
Speaker 1: never was. It is a clock, a garden, and a
Speaker 1: keeper of stories. Any One who enters its rowse becomes
Speaker 1: one more turn of the wheel, never lost, only woven
Speaker 1: into the memory of what grows in order and in time,
Speaker 1: for as long as some one is willing to see
Speaker 1: the pattern and turn with it. And that is the end.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
Speaker 1: the next one.