The Lane We Mowed Across the Hayfield

The blue pickup was sitting crosswise in our lane when I walked up to open the gate at twenty past seven, with the frost still white on the grass in the low spots.

It took me a second to understand what I was looking at.

Our lane is gravel, one truck wide, with the ditch on one side and the fence on the other. There was no getting around that truck.

Over the mouth of the lane, hung between the two gate posts on baling twine, was a sheet of plywood.

Somebody had painted one word on it in thick black house paint, the letters running where the brush had been too full. Closed.

I knew the truck before I knew the sign. I had ridden in that truck to two funerals and one wedding.

It belonged to my husband’s sister, Darla Pickard, and she was sitting behind the wheel with the engine off.

It was the first Saturday in October in Adams County, Pennsylvania.

It was the one weekend of the year our orchard opens for u-pick, and the gate was supposed to swing open at nine.

I want to tell you what that weekend means to a place like ours, because otherwise none of the rest makes sense.

We sell to a packing house most of the year, and the packing house pays what it pays.

But the u-pick weekend is different. Families come out from Gettysburg and Hanover and clear down from Maryland.

They pay about thirty dollars for a half-bushel bag and fill it themselves, and they buy cider and pies on the way out.

A good Saturday brings in around six thousand dollars. That one Saturday pays the propane through February and most of the spring spray bill.

Without it we would be going to the bank in March with our hat in our hand.

Darla knew that. Everybody in the family knew that. Her father had built the u-pick weekend himself, forty years ago, with a hand-lettered sign and a coffee can for the money.

I walked up to her window. She rolled it down about three inches, the way you would for a stranger at a gas station.

She had a thermos on the seat and a blanket over her knees. She had come to stay.

“Darla,” I said. “What is this?”

“It says what it is.” She did not look at me. She looked straight ahead through the windshield, down the lane toward the barn and the trees. “Closed.”

“We open at nine. There will be cars here by half past eight. You know that.”

“Then they’ll turn around.” She took a sip from the thermos lid. “People turn around all the time. It won’t kill anybody.”

I stood there with the gate key in my hand and felt my face go hot.

I am fifty years old and I do not cry easily, but I felt it start somewhere behind my eyes, and I pushed it back down.

“Your mother is in the hospice house in Gettysburg,” I said quietly. “Reuben has been sitting with her since Thursday night. Is this really where you want to be this morning?”

That was the first time she turned and looked at me.

Her eyes were red rimmed, like she had not slept, and her mouth was set the way her father’s used to be when a buyer tried to shave a price.