Hummingbird with floral linework on upper back

The wasps have had the windfalls under the Discovery trees since Tuesday, and the men from the cider house have stopped pretending to mind. I am writing this on the bench by the wall with the ink pot balanced on Mother's old hymn book, because the light in the parlour is too thin for anything worth saying.

Something came through the orchard gate on Sunday that I have not been able to explain to anyone. Mrs Pryor from the lower farm swears it was a bird, though she also swore the Michaelmas moon had a face. It hung over the phlox along the wall as if someone had lifted it on a string, wings blurring to nothing, and it pushed its long dark needle of a beak into every bloom. Green across the back, bright as a beetle's, then a flash of red at the tail and a rim of blue at the wings when it turned. I did not breathe for the whole minute it stayed.

I put out a saucer of sugar water on Monday because Father always said a thing that visits twice has decided something. It came back this morning at six, while the mist was still lying in the rows, and it drank with the greyest patience I have ever seen in anything small. Afterwards it sat on the fence post with its tail fanned, like a lady finishing a letter of her own.

I have set a second saucer on the wall for you. The ship is due in Bristol by the end of the month, and you wrote that you would come home before the frost took the last of the apples. Come and see whether it knows your name.

Your sister, Nell