An Orchard on the Ridge

The trees in Esther’s orchard were like house plants. They grew and lived alongside her with a slight touch of personality. Each tree had a name and each tree received conversation from the woman who tended to their needs.

There were seventy apple trees, six cherry, three plumb and a several other varieties of fresh fruits which made themselves at home in the rich fertile soil of her farmland.

The orchard trees that surrounded Esther’s country home grew in spirit, offering not only crop and shade, but comfort and companionship to a woman who was left alone to tend to the needs of a large farm with her soft feminine hands.

George, her deceased husband planted them in uniform rows and kept them pruned like a barber with a straight edge razor. For a quarter of a mile the trees grew in fresh country air, and owned the ground in which they sunk their roots. The trees were thirsty for the rich nutrients abundant in the mountain range that absorbed much of the energy from the second great ice age. Years and years of pressing ice from the north ended their journey south, and left behind the topsoil from continents once fertilized with dinosaur dung. Esther owned that fertile soil.

The trees sucked up ice age energy and produced fruits so sweet and tender that the deer which ate them often became intoxicated and wondered in a drunken stupor across the seventy acres which encompassed Esther’s farm.

The trees grew like whiskers on a house cat in the soil of Stone Creek Ridge. The fruits were excellent for making hard cider, a favorite liqueur of residents in the nearby farming village of Petersburg.

Esther knew she had to keep the orchard thriving just like her husband had always done. These were trees that her children grew up among and citizens of town came to depend upon. Their fruits fed the hungry mouths of her offspring like sweet breasts of mother nature. It seemed at the time of her husband’s death, after nearly thirty years of dedicated farming and pampering, the trees were in their prime.

She talked a lot to those trees over the years, she didn’t want to abandon them, like she almost abandoned her husband George the night before he died.

Harvest was far more abundant than what even George could have ever predicted years following his death. Esther felt responsible for every last fruit that dropped from trees on top of and around her pink mobile home after her husband passed away.

Esther could feel the ground move slightly from time to time inside her mobile home. The roots of the apple trees were strong enough to rock her trailer, and she felt the ground move during the months of May and June, when apple trees grow like weeds.

The trees sometimes haunted Esther while living in a mobile home parked in the middle of an apple orchard. She was accustomed to living in a solid farm house built on a firm foundation in the silver clay bedrock of mountainous Appalachia. It took a long time to get used to not sleeping in her big bed in the farm house. She would much rather have been a beautician than an underground connection for inexpensive booze. She had many sleepless nights living in those hills and a trailer was the only solution for escape from a house that like the trees of her orchard, had a personality all its own.

The power in the roots of the growing trees reminded of Esther of George. She didn’t sleep well in the pink tin can on the farm after he passed, especially with the ground moved about like it did. She sometimes thought he was cuddling up next to her again while she laid alone in her bed in the trailer. She awoke from dreams with her legs parted, imagining that another child was being sown within her.

She thought by purchasing a mobile home, she could somehow out-fox the unrested spirit of her late husband by moving out of the farm house and into a "modern trailer". Even the personalities of the apple trees didn’t keep the spirit of George at bay, they seemed to enhance his haunts. And the neighbors still came by needing cider.

Living in a mobile home in the middle of an apple orchard was torture for a woman who lost her dearly beloved in a car accident. She cried for one entire day after he drank himself into a slumber and escorted himself along with his Ford into eternity. He drove his car off a cliff on Stone Creek Ridge in a drunken rampage. It wasn’t a happy ending to a stormy marriage.

Esther often wondered if she did something wrong that made him drive so irresponsibly.
She loved the farm house in which she and her deceased husband raised twelve children, but Esther was on her way out the farm door– running from the abuse like a hen running from a thunderstorm with all her chicks. She told George to keep everything, including the farm in the divorce. All she wanted was her freedom from a strong man with a dark side.

He couldn’t handle the ice age energy of Stone Creek Ridge alone without his beautiful wife next to his side. He eased the pain of loneliness by drinking gallon after pint of hard cider infused with Esther’s Sassafras Tea. But still the loneliness wouldn’t subside.

When Esther first learned her husband perished in a tragic car accident, she crowed like a rooster at 4 a.m. during Daylight Savings Time and cried loudly for the farm that was rightfully hers– earned the hard way, through sweat, blood and tears.

People in Central Pennsylvania still whisper about the night that George killed himself over Esther, the peasant Irish country girl with freckles all over her succulent frame.
Following the news of George’s "accident" townsfolk atop Stone Creek Ridge rumored that Esther told George she was leaving him, and that’s what led to the horrible tragedy one peculiar night in the late Fall of 1956. Local farmers chuckled together and said things like "Damn, I’d kill my self too if a piece of ass like that was leaving my barnyard."

But it was so much deeper than what the townsfolk read into and understood about George and Esther’s marriage. Sure he was a wealthy farmer, born of English wealth and prestige and owned almost half of the bulging landscape of the rolling mountain which gave birth to Stone Creek Ridge. George could have had any woman in the county as his farm wife, yet he choose a poor Irish girl with red devil hair.

Esther was a babe. She was a hairdresser for country girls and could take even the most tangled of hair and turn it into a crop as shinny as the first harvest of hay in late June. Her hair was beautiful, like it were touched by God, and local ladies got their hair done by Esther because they wanted theirs to look just like hers.

But George and other farm boys knew his wife shined like dandy lion wine compared to dirty blonde girls of German descent. Other local girls with their square shaped bodies were no match for "Esther the Husband Pesterer."

Perhaps the local girls believed they would capture some of her light and beauty when she ran her fingers through their natty hair as their hair perm specialist.

Esther had the type of ass that any farmer with a mule and plow would want to work over in the mountain sun. She had red Irish hair and tits the size of spaghetti squash. Freckles adorned her face as well as her bosom. After the beauty shop closed sharply at 4 p.m., she worked in her garden. She bent over a lot, picking weeds– a battle that never could have been won. It never occurred to her in her innocence she was being watched like a hawk while tending to her vegetable garden.

Despite the fact that George made and posted a sign at the end of the dirt road leading up to the farm which read "Perm Shop and Farm Closes At 4 O’Clock", locals always stopped by wanting to buy a gallon or two of cider, or have their hair done for a church social on late Fall evenings.
The intruding neighbor’s infuriated George. He knew they were coming by to get a glance of Esther in her garden. They were like hummingbirds drawn to a pumpkin blossom.

Through the eyes of local country townsfolk, Esther and George appeared to be as perfect as two Robins in a nest. If Stone Creek Ridge had celebrities in the 1950s, they were George and Esther. The farm and perm shop never really closed. The locals were addicted to the cider crop made by the popular couple, and the sheer hospitality of the charming two.

But at night, after everything really did close down on the farm, when nobody else was around but the apple trees and farm animals, all hell broke loose in Ciderville. Esther sometimes thought she saw eyes looking in at her from the apple orchard while she gazed away in bliss while George reminded her of how beautiful she was. "No, I’m just imagining they are watching us!" Esther giggled to herself in pure delight while George kept trying to plant more and more apple seeds within her devilish plot of fertile land.

George never really believed Esther when she promised that his was the only sickle she would take within her loins during her bountiful life. But he did it to her over and over again just to be sure of that. He forced a might much sharper than skin and hard flesh within her night after night. He seemed to punish her for his own doubts. Esther was so sorry that men adored her like they did and hung out in apple trees on cold January nights in Pennsylvania.

George didn’t deserve to live a life in the limelight just because he married a beautiful girl.
She had enough– enough sex and enough public displays of affection. The hard cider had lured not only deer, but pure evil into the soul of the orchard and farm.

She couldn’t stand it any longer! She planned to leave George and the farm animals for good. Her husband may have had all the locals fooled with his square jaw line but Esther knew first hand, his nature was far from being well-bred.

Esther learned the hard way that there was a sinister side to her husband’s bloodline, wealth and popularity. The never ending punishing attitude from those who wanted what they had together never went away. Not even the serenity of an apple orchard could remove the jealousy of the poor both when George was alive and after he passed.

Esther thought she had figured it all out– the escape from that hell. She was on her way out of town, ready to file for a divorce when she learned that George had died. She ran back into the arms of her dead lover when she realized she could own the farm and house, and live there, without being confronted by the horrors of a deeply religious farming community and a husband who couldn’t get enough. She would take back the farm and sell only pure apple cider, not the kind that makes men horny jealous bastards. She would undue the sin of mixing two types of apple juice together.

She tore up the divorce papers before they had the chance to be filed and told the judge that she wasn’t leaving George, she was only going to visit her daughter when she packed several bags and went storming away from her life and marriage that cold night on Stone Creek Ridge.
She knew the judges eyes very well, and he awarded her the estate.

"Thank God for small miracles!" she told herself over and over again in the years to follow as she shared the farm and its land with her youngest son and his family. The trees stopped talking to her and she made an honest living selling her crops in local markets.

When her favorite grandson Charlie spent nights with her in the trailer years later, the ground stopped shaking. The trees had reached their full maturity and roots no longer fought for space in the fertile ground. She gazed down upon her grandson sleeping in her trailer like she did on those nights staring out at the orchard with eyes. She hoped he would never experience a life like hers in that old Stone Creek Mountain orchard.

Esther understood the secrets to making cider. It takes two different types of apples to create intoxicating cider. The mixing of the threads from different cloths was the magic that produces an evil in hard apple cider and makes one the envy of all their neighbors.

She kissed the cowlick on Charlie’s forehead and thanked the Lord for all she had.
She knew George was with her again just like she knew that hard cider makes itself with just a little bit of pampering, conversation, yeast and juices plucked from different vines.