Our orchard has grown through the years from a single tree to over a hundred. They spread down a grassy slope.

Last winter winter weighed heavy on the limbs, and spring iced the flowers. The trees are unlikely to bear fruit this season. Still, we must tend them. A few years back, the wild mulberries failed to produce. By midsummer raccoons, thin, starving, ragged, were raiding the granaries and barns, even breaking into the houses, desperate for food. The cherry trees that year also failed, but the following year, both mulberries and cherries bloomed and the boughs dipped low with fruit. No one had ever seen such abundance. Even people who hated cherries and mulberries ate them anyway, there were just too many, being prepared and served in too many ways, to say no, and when the path before you is partially blocked by a low limb heavy with plump, juicy, sweet-smelling fruit, it is impossible to not sample just one, if not devour dozens.

Our greatest fear is an overabundance of apples. The heavier the crop, the longer it takes to destroy them all, and the greater the chance that someone will yield to temptation and eat one, and the eternal harmony of the world we have built for ourselves, all these centuries, in this garden, will be destroyed, for the apple remains forbidden.