Multicoloured geometric dog on forearm

The windfalls came down all at once this week, the way they do when the nights turn cold and the wasps get drunk on the Discovery apples under the trees. Mum has the pickers working the lower rows, and Biscuit has appointed himself their supervisor. He is a terrier cross with a head the colour of wet bark and ears that shoot up whenever a ladder creaks, and he has been running the rows like a man late for a train.

Yesterday he went missing after lunch. I found him by the old potting shed, sitting on his haunches with his nose pointed at the sky, and between his teeth was one of the coloured glass offcuts Dad left in the shed when the chapel windows were replaced. Orange, pink, a sliver of cornflower blue. He had carried it all the way from the shed to the far wall, a distance he has never once bothered with for a ball.

I should have taken it off him. Instead I sat on an upturned crate and watched him drop it at my feet, then lie down in the grass so the light came through it and laid little coloured triangles across his flanks. He looked like something cut from the chapel window and set loose to run. Dad always said the best things in this valley were broken on purpose. I think he would have laughed at the dog, and then made him a frame.

Come up at the weekend if you can. Bring the good ladder, and tell Biscuit you have not come for him. Love, Nell