Chapter 16. From the Journal of Fortinbras Took, S.R. 1158

We were picking apples in the Southwest Orchards today when a contest broke out amongst the tweens, to see who could throw quickest and with the most accuracy at a mark. Of course there were plenty of apples at hand for the throwing, and the rest of us became involved as well, the younger set setting up a mark of our own and doing a creditable job, if I do say so.

And then Grandfa and Da and two of the Uncles came riding, probably to check on the progress of harvest but in any event drawn by the noise and confusion.

Apples are to be taken gently in hand, plucked with tender firmness from the parent tree, and laid with their fellows to sleep for the short journey to the storage caverns where they will spend the winter, fetched for apple tart or apple sauce or baked apple or apple cake or any number of delights, until the last of them, wrinkled with age, give up their sweetness at last, not long before the new harvest.

Apples are not to be jostled or thumped. One bruised apple can rot an entire barrelful.

Grandfa was livid. He was almost his old self again. I might have been glad to see it, but for the discomfort of enduring the scolding and the lecture that followed.

All of the “wasted” apples must be pressed into cider, and when our day of picking apples from the trees is done, the day is not done, so to speak. For after, whilst the rest of the Tooks take tea, we must pick up all of the windfalls, until the ground is as clean as if an old sharp-eyed gammer had been watching her daughter sweep.

The most chilling moment, I think, was not the scolding nor the lecture, but after, when they began to ride away, and then Grandfa stopped his pony, and turned stiffly in the saddle, and said, ‘Waste not... want not.’

Some of the tweens groaned, thinking the lecture was about to start once more, but Grandfa only shook his head and there was something in his face that made the words we’ve heard so often take on a darker meaning. I know you’ll say I’m full of fancies, but...

It makes me shiver, even now, and the day is yet quite warm though the Sun is low in the sky. Fanny saved me a plate from tea, for she said it wasn’t right that a growing lad should go hungry, and so I am eating and writing, hid away in the Thain’s garden, behind the old iron bench.

And soon I must take my plate back to the kitchens (or I’ll never hear the end of it from Fanny), and myself off to bed, for there are still orchards-full of fruit to be picked before harvest is done.

It might be worse. I’d rather pick apples than be out haying in the heat of the sun. Apples are cool and crisp, and hay is dry and prickly, and you haven’t the shade of the trees when you’re haying, either. Still, all the tweens who were picking with us today will be out haying on the morrow, and that leaves more work for us who are left behind to pick.

Serves us all right, I suppose.

But it was a lot of fun while it lasted.