Greengage summer

A biscuit-beige earthenware pot holds the first harvest of the old greengage trees. He takes his scythe to the abandoned orchard, working among the fruit trees planted, tended and loved by his grandfather.

He clears a path around the toppled, tumbling stones and clatter- down terracotta tiles of the old pig shed.

He curses his inheritance, the hard work and his tired, calloused hands. Then he curses the mole who has ploughed through the orchard leaving rich, red-and-cocoa-coloured hills of crumbled earth.

He stops and surveys the issue of Reine Claude Verte; a clutch of gob-stopper plums in a nest of nettles sheltered by weary, season’s-end boughs. The summer’s searing rays have polished their dusty, powder-pink bloom to a precious, milky jade – each one a little queen of the fruit orchard.

Once they were harvested and then preserved, a sweet taste of summer on a winter’s day. His grandfather smiled when he told people they had been his wife’s favourite fruit; their cellar was full of jams and preserves, each labelled with ‘Reine Claude’ and the date in her handwriting. He had been unable to throw them away.

Now they waste on the ground. The smooth, innocent and freshly fallen alongside the moisture-sucked, withered and wizened; sad days of decay, their skin torn apart and feasted on by the wasps who grow drunk on their precious flesh.

He twists a plum from a branch. Taught, tight he presses down his teeth and it pops in his mouth in a blowsy, full-blown rush. His tongue travels the long grooves of the stone, coaxing each tiny, tangy hair of flesh.

He reaches once more into the branches and he remembers sitting on his grandfather’s shoulders, stretching his thin, little boy arms, straining his hands, each finger, reaching for more fruit; like reaching into the night sky for emerald stars.

He takes a bag from his pocket.

Then he slowly fills it to the top with fruit and more memories.