Small crescent moon on a finger

The Bramley row is picked clean now, though you'd not know it from the wasps. Dad kept the ladder out past dark on Tuesday, swearing at the lamp, because the forecast said rain and he wanted the Discovery off before it split. I held the torch. You'd have laughed: he had me pointing it at his boots the whole time, as if the apples were under them.

Something happened at the far end of the orchard that I haven't told anyone. The old pear by the stile has a crescent cut into its bark, a thumb's width, healed over to a pale grey. Grandad made it the summer you were born, he told me, so the tree would know which of us was which. I always took that for one of his jokes. On Tuesday the moon came up thin and low over the hedge, and it was the same shape as that scar, so exact that I stood there with the torch switched off, feeling foolish.

Dad came down the ladder and said nothing about it. He just took the basket from me, and we walked back up the track with the moon behind us, very thin, as though someone had pared it with a knife.

I've kept three pears in the drawer for you. They're no good for eating. Come and see the tree before the frost gets in.

Love, Jo