Hamsa hand with mandala pattern

The Bramleys came in early this year, and Mr Okafor says the Conference pears will be ready before the month is out. I have been in the rows since six, counting baskets with a stub of pencil behind my ear. The wasps are bad at the windfalls, and the air smells of cider vinegar and cut grass, which I know you will say is the best smell in England, and which I will not argue with.

Something odd turned up on Tuesday. Mrs Dunning sent the Eastwood lads up the ladder to take down the old netting on the north wall, and under a loose board in the packing shed they found a tin box. Inside was a wooden palm no bigger than your hand, painted with a flower at its centre and fans of little scalloped arcs running out to the fingers. Someone had drawn teardrops along the base in ink gone brown with age. Mrs Dunning said her mother used to hang such things over the barn doors to keep off bad weather, and that the pattern was copied from a cloth brought back from Lahore.

I took the palm home and stitched a loop of ribbon through its wrist. Mum asked why I was fussing over an old bit of wood, and I said I liked how the lines carried the eye around, the way the rows do when you stand at the end of the orchard and look down them. She laughed and said that was the most orchard thing I had ever said.

Come home for the picking if you can. Bring nothing but yourself. I will leave the palm on the nail by the shed door, where the sun catches the flower at four o'clock.

Love, Nell