Zara
One Year Later
My desk faces the orchard. I didn't plan it that way — the desk came first, secondhand, wedged into the farmhouse's east room because it caught the best light at the hour I actually work — but it turns out the best light in this house comes through a window that looks straight down Rourke's grandfather's original rows.
I can't say I mind the view when I'm stuck on a sentence and need somewhere to let my eyes rest while the right word finds me.
The regional award sits on the shelf above the desk, small and a little dusty already because I keep forgetting to wipe it down.
Best long-form feature, the piece I wrote instead of the one I was originally assigned, the one about patience and thirty-eight acres and a man who let a stranger with a recorder taste his cider before he'd decided to trust anyone else with it.
My editor still brings it up whenever she calls, half-joking that she should send me back into the field more often if this is what I file when I stop being professional about my sources.
I never correct her on the timeline. Some things aren't hers to know exactly when.
Three more Silver Ridge pieces in the works now — a beekeeper who won't come down from his mountain for anything short of an emergency, a sawmill owner raising a daughter who already bosses grown men around at the Saturday market like she owns the place, a woman two towns over who's been quietly running the best bakery in the valley out of her own kitchen for eleven years without ever once advertising.
This valley has more stories in it than one magazine feature could ever hold, and I'm not in any hurry to leave before I've told all the ones worth telling.
My ring catches the desk lamp when I move my hand across the page — small, plain, his grandmother's setting reworked with a stone Rourke picked out himself, standing at a jeweler's counter in Calgary looking, according to the man who sold it to him, like he'd rather have been anywhere else on earth.
He told me that story on our wedding night, half-laughing, still not quite believing he'd pulled it off without me guessing.
Downstairs I hear the screen door bang, boots coming off, and then Rourke's voice calling up that Orrin's truck just pulled in with the new labels.
The cider's got a label this year. Small batch, his grandfather's press, his own hand on the final blend — HARDING ORCHARDS, 1961, printed plain across the front, and underneath it, smaller, a line I wrote for him because he sat with a blank page for a week straight and couldn't find the words himself: Some things take longer than they need to, and are better for it.
Two hundred and forty bottles this year. I go down to help him and Orrin stack the first cases by the barn door, and Orrin holds one label up to the light like he's inspecting a diamond instead of a sticker.
"This is going to sell out in an hour," he says. "Same as last year."
"It sold out in an hour last year because you told everyone in the valley to line up before I even opened the tent," Rourke says.
"I told them the truth. That's not the same thing as cheating."
I watch my husband roll his eyes at his oldest friend, watch the ease of it, twenty years of history sitting easy between two men stacking crates in a barn that still smells like the same cider it smelled like the first night I stood in here with a recorder in my pocket and no idea what I was about to fall into.
Some stubborn part of him still braces every single time, still half expects someone to say the wrong thing about something he made with his own hands.
I've stopped trying to talk him out of that particular habit.
I just stand close enough that when the good opinions come back instead — and they always do — he's got somewhere to look that isn't the ground.
Harvest again. Different rhythm to it this year — not because the trees changed, they never really do, but because I have.
I finish the label count around six and walk out into the orchard while Rourke and Orrin argue good-naturedly about pricing, and I stand under the canopy with my head tipped all the way back, staring up at red and gold stitched into a ceiling like I've never once seen it before, even though I've seen it every October since the first one, even though I'll see it every October left to come.
I hear him before I see him, boots heavy with a full day's work, coming up the row toward me, Orrin's truck already pulling out down the gravel behind him.
"You're doing it again," he says, same as he said the first week, standing in almost the same spot in the row.
"I'll always do it." I don't look away from the trees. "It's still the most beautiful thing I've ever stood inside, and I've been inside it three hundred and sixty-some times now."
"Counting."
"Somebody has to keep the records around here. You certainly don't."
He laughs — the real one, the rare one I used to have to work for and now get for free most evenings — and comes to stand beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch, both of us looking up instead of at each other for once.
"Still can't believe an eight-hundred-word assignment turned into this," he says.
"I told my editor it needed more color." I lean into him. "Turns out I meant the whole rest of my life."
I'm not a stranger with a recorder anymore.
Haven't been for a long while. I'm the reason he finally let people taste what he'd been making alone for twenty years before me, and I'm staying for the whole season — every season, for as long as the trees keep bearing and the light keeps turning gold in October the way it always has, the way it always will, row after row, year after year, both of us right here inside it.