Snowfall Over the Orchard

The first snow of the winter arrives at dusk, unhurried, and the orchard keeper does what he does every year on this evening: he walks the rows. There are twenty rows, ten trees to a row, two hundred trees, every one of them asleep — which is the correct and scientific term, he will have you know, for what an apple tree does all winter. The snow settles. He counts. The counting is not going anywhere in particular.

The ending, given away now: he reaches row twenty, or he doesn't — even he seems unsure, by then, and unbothered. The snow continues into the morning without him.

The first minute

The snow began the way the best snow does, with a kind of administrative quietness, as though the sky had simply changed its filing system. The orchard keeper stood at the head of the first row and watched the flakes make their unhurried decisions — this branch, that branch, the ground between — and found, as he found every year, that there was nothing in the orchard that needed him and no reason at all not to walk the rows anyway. Row one held the early sweets, asleep since October. The snow was settling into the forks of their branches with the care of someone making up two hundred small beds…

Why this one works at night

Counting sheep, but the sheep are trees, and they are already asleep, and a warm voice does the counting for you. The rows pass at an even pace with nothing at stake; listeners tend to go down somewhere in the russets.

“…row eleven held the old russets, who wore the snow the way elderly gentlemen wear hats, that is to say correctly, and with no interest whatsoever in the opinion of—”

The kind of sentence people fall asleep during