Audio (read by Zubair Umatiya):
I briefly had an urge to have an orchard. An open orchard with midsize fruiting trees planted in somewhat slanted rows, on a hill overlooking a deep and wide canyon or densely packed forest. Either way (canyon or forest) would do. If my orchard looked out over a canyon: great. From my vantage point up there among my fruit trees I would be able to see for miles and miles. The canyons would be dug into hard, brown earth, like the landscapes of West Texas. Not striking red and orange rocks like those of Utah (or Arizona). That type of stuff gets old after a while. I don’t deny it’s pretty, it’s just too crumbly for my money. Brown rock and tan rock, be it granite, basalt or limestone, has a deep sturdiness about it that only begins to impress its beauty upon you over time. If it were a canyon that lay below, I would stand in my orchard, contemplating the modest tones of the Earth, the grand scale forces that led to their creation, and the same set of forces that would one day give rise to their demise.
Otherwise, if there was a forest down the hill from my orchard, I would spend less time looking out. But a forest, like a canyon, is also a good thing to have beneath one’s orchard. There would be a stream among the trees in the valley. From above, from my orchard, I would try to guess at where the stream ran. But it would be a losing game. The canopy would give no clues; the branches of trees whose roots would begin on either side of the stream would grow towards each other and meet on top of the water, 40 feet above, interlocking like fingers clasped in prayer. From beneath the foliage, therefore, the stream would be shaded, and if I ever got around to forging a path down to the creek (for, actually, it’d be more of a creek than a stream), I would go down there often to spend time beneath the treetops, in the shade, by the creek, on one big rock with a flat top, on the bank across the creek from my orchard. From on top of that rock, I would think about how, up in my orchard, not a 15 minute walk out of the valley from where I sat, I would have no shot at pointing out where the rock was. It would all look the same from up there. But if I were to walk to it from the orchard, I would be able to get to it without thinking. I would know the land not by sight but by foot.
The trees in my orchard would bear different types of fruit. Some trees would grow peaches, some apricots, some cherries, and some, the ones in the row closest to the house, would be specialty trees that grew hybrid fruit. Each type of tree would require a different amount of water. Each would become ripe and thus ready to be harvested at a different time of year (though all within the same season). I would retain relevant information and write down specific tips and dates to remind myself in future years. I would keep extensive records. I would become attuned to the needs of my trees.
My wife, if I had one, or long-term partner, if we decided marriage wasn’t for us, would make pluot preserves from fruit grown in our orchard. Pluots, in fact, would be her favorite of the fruits we grew. She would claim that apricots were too dry for her and plums too juicy. Pluots, she would be fond of saying, were the goldilocks of stone fruit. I would think to myself, “wouldn’t that make you the goldilocks in this situation? The fruit would be the porridge and the pluot would be the porridge that was just right, to your taste, but you would be the goldilocks.” I would never say this out loud to her, though, because there’s a certain implication that goldilocks is an overly picky character, who only accepts things if they are just as she likes them. To compare my wife or long-term partner to goldilocks with this well known implication lurking beneath the surface would be an unfair comparison. She would not be picky at all. She would just have a special affinity for pluots.
We would joke, while waiting for the jars to boil, that “Pluot Preserves” would sell for so much more at a farmers market than “Plum Jelly” would, even if, taste-wise, they would not be far off. We would develop an intricate series of jokes in which, tinkering with our recipe slightly, we would devise the most pricey farm stand jam we could think of. A 12 ounce jar of “Maple Chile Pluot Preserves” would sell for 16 dollars. “Vanilla Bourbon Berry Spread” would only go for 12. Soon, everything we came across would get appraised to be sold at our farmer’s market stand. “Old Growth Mahogany Chair”: $92. “Swedish Lamp (Ikea)”: $41. “Start Your Own Orchard Kit (Peach Pit in a Cardboard Box)”: $55. “Pleasant Stroll on a Beautiful Day with a Perfect Young Family”: $120. “Month Off Vacation from Your Kids (Leave Them to Us)”: $1,300. “9 Year Old Kid with Shoulder-Length Hair”: $12,499. Somehow, over time, the joke would morph into a joke about selling children at a farmers market. I would vaguely see the satire of such stark juxtaposition, but it would mostly be my charming wife/long-term partner who would steer the joke in that direction. Not to throw her under the bus. Just saying. It would very rarely be me who brought up the child trafficking notion. It would nearly always be my better half. She would have a dark sense of humor that would sometimes catch me unawares. About half the time these jokes of hers would crack me up, but the rest of the time they’d just fall flat. She wouldn’t care though; she would keep the jokes coming no matter what reaction she got. And, in this way, she would wear people down. Sometimes I would try to make jokes like hers, but they would just come off as creepy or uncomfortable. Especially early on in our relationship, drunk off the dangerous, hilarious way she would carry herself, I would embarrass myself a couple times in front of other people, getting too bold and saying something offensive I didn’t even mean such as, “Wouldn’t you guys eat human meat if the human died of natural causes?” But behind closed doors, my (at that time) future wife/long-term partner and I would laugh and laugh. As time went on, I would learn to leave the jokes to her and she would learn to leave the orchard tending to me.
I would devote long days to tending it. There would never be any shortage of work to be done. Planting, sowing, watering, trimming, mowing the space between my trees, building dirt mounds within shallow ditches around my trees to protect their roots, erecting fences to keep pests out, evaluating soil samples for signs of biological red flags, conducting multi-year experiments to track the health of my trees, staying up late after a hard day’s work to plan out what work would be required the following day, and, of course, harvesting. My wife or long-term partner would try to help with some of these tasks, she really would mean only to help. But she wouldn’t grasp the full extent of all that I would be doing behind the scenes to keep my orchard in order. How could she? I would never expect her to know everything that went into maintaining an orchard if she hadn’t done it herself. All I would ask would be that she wouldn’t pretend to be an equal partner in the orchard without contributing nearly one fraction of the work I put into it. No, I would never wish to diminish the contributions she would have made, all I would be asking would be for her to show me the same respect. She would say, “What are you even doing out there all day, with your test tubes? Orchards have existed for much longer than test tubes have.” And I would try to explain it to her, but she wouldn’t be interested in an actual answer. She would only be interested in belittling my work. She would say, “You don’t want to be equal partners because I am a woman” and I would have no way to respond. She would accuse me of being overly protective of my orchard. She would say I put all my self-worth in that orchard and wouldn’t know what to do with myself without it. She would even, one time, go so far as to suggest I loved the orchard more than I loved her.
And she would be right, of course. I would have nothing without my orchard, if I had an orchard. She would probably be great at maintaining an orchard. What would I know? If she existed, if she had any knack for gardening or fostering life, she would be the one to have an orchard, not me. If she had even the smallest bit of sticktoitiveness in her, she would be a better orchard keeper than I would. What do I know about soil samples, getting dirt under my fingernails, harvesting fruit at different times of year? I have never had the work ethic for such a large project. Besides a brief urge and a nice idea, I will never have an orchard.