Walk by faith script on the foot

You will think I have lost my wits, but I have walked the whole length of Pellow's orchard with my boots tied together and slung over my shoulder like a pair of dead rabbits. The grass is cut to stubble now and the ground is bruised purple where the Conference pears have dropped. Old Tom Pellow says the wasps know the season better than the almanac, and they were out in their hundreds, drunk on the windfalls.

Mother's words keep coming back to me as I go. She used to say you could not get anywhere on the road if you kept staring at the ground for snakes, so you had to trust the next step would hold. Walk by faith, she'd say, and then laugh, because it was the line stitched on the sampler in the hall and she had never once kept it herself. I have been trying it out all afternoon, stepping from the gate to the first row of trees with my eyes shut for three paces at a time. Mostly it works.

I met the new lad at the far wall, the one Pellow took on from the Haskell farm. He was up a ladder with a basket and a face like thunder, and when I asked why he wasn't picking, he said the top rows were not ready and he would not pull them green for anybody. I told him that is exactly what I would have said at his age. He looked at my bare feet on the cold earth and said nothing, but he handed me a pear, warm from the sun.

I am writing this on the back of the seed catalogue because my pen has run dry. Come up at Michaelmas. Bring your good boots, and leave the shoes you wear to church behind, because I want you to feel what the grass is like. I will meet you at the gate.