Harvest of Shame †Massacre of the Orchard :: Personal Narrative Writing

Harvest of Shame – Massacre of the Orchard As orchards go, it really wasn't much; especially considering the grand scale of the orchards that dotted the region. Where the latter were measured in thousands of trees, or thousands of bushels per acre, the former was merely thirty-two trees. Thirty-two trees . . . really, if the question arose, that was the only way you could define it. Obviously you couldn't say there were "four-thousand Macintosh trees," or that it yielded "two-thousand bushels per acre," because all it had was thirty-two trees; and some of those trees were pear, cherry, plum and peach trees besides. On top of that, talking of "yield" was really an embarrassment since birds ate virtually all the cherries, the plums were diseased, and, for the most part, the species of the bulk of the apples were never conclusively identified. But, it was an orchard nonetheless, and not everyone had such a thing. Realistically, the thing was a pain to own. Domesticated fruit trees have a proclivity to become wild. They require constant and proper attention to maintain them to any fruit bearing capacity. If you did manage the pruning aspect properly (which, though attempted on a regular basis, never quite happened), the various insects that sought them out as a source of nourishment and shelter were legion. If by some happenstance the trees did produce mature fruit, unscathed by the insect hordes, you had to wage a contest with all sorts of winged beasts for the honor of the prize. (Contest? For all intents and purposes it was a war.) If that wasn't enough, trying to mow the "lawn" was a real ordeal. Thirty-two tree trunks were obstacle enough to negotiate; add to that the multiplicity of branches that hung low enough to snag you by the eye sockets as you rode by, it made each mowing an adventure. In retrospect, for all the work that went into the orchard, the only things it produced were fat birds and contented pigs (they sometimes escaped their pasture and inevitably ended up in the orchard munching apples)-one cannot recall even one pie from its offerings. In spite of all those annoyances, the orchard offered a perfect environment for a growing boy to explore and live every adventure one of such stature could imagine. As such things go, it was paradise: it was isolated, there was an overgrown patch of land adjacent to it that started at the same level as the orchard but started to slope until it was a sheer drop of some twelve feet by the time it reached the back of the orchard.