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The old orchard sometimes seemed a place of delicious secrets, Emily discovered, in all of the seasons.
She had thought that autumn might have been sad in the old orchard, the flowers fading away and the leaves falling from the trees. But it was anything but sad, she discovered. As the leaves around her changed and fell, they left a carpet richer than any she might have walked on before. The red of the leaves was as deep as the wallpaper in the New Moon sitting-room, and the golds were brighter than the gilt on the Venetian beads her father had given her their last Christmas together.
The branches, now that they were bared seemed friendly to Emily. The trees were set apart in the way of an orchard, and yet they had grown enough to reach out and touch one another. She rather thought of them as holding hands, something she told Cousin Jimmy one afternoon as they sat in his garden in the fading light.
“Holding hands?” He repeated her words, but there was no malice in it, no disbelief as might have come from Aunt Elizabeth. Jimmy nodded slowly, considering her words and looking back over his shoulder as if he might catch a glimpse. “Maybe they are. They’d be old friends now, those trees have been there nearly as long as the house.”
Soon the wind would blow away the leaves, and the snow would begin to drift in. In the orchard it came down like powder that first winter -- a dusting of sugar over everything. The bare branches gleamed silver in the sun, and Emily thought they were even more magical. Once the snow built and ice dripped from the edges of limbs she thought that the old orchard was like a church. Surely God would be in a place such as this, a place of such serene peace?
Sometimes, that first winter, Emily would whisper to her father there, instead of writing him letters. The sun would warm her face and she was sure that it was him looking down on her and going slowly as he had promised.
It was in the old orchard that Ilse chased her with balls of snow, chucking them at each other one afternoon. The snow had exploded against her heavy wool coat, and in that burst of cold and the laughter that followed, Emily felt happy.
“You’ll catch your death of cold,” Aunt Elizabeth had scolded her when Emily tramped in one night, late from her chores, her cheeks flushed and mittens lost. “And where are your mitts? If you’ve left them out in the field or with the chickens, they’re as good as lost.”
“I couldn’t catch my death there, Aunt Elizabeth,” she has responded sincerely and gravely. “Not in such a wondrous place.”
Her Aunt had looked at her -- not the full-fledged Murray look, but close enough that Emily had not said any of the other things that she had wanted to. Not how she felt closer to God than in the church they went to every Sunday, and certainly not how she spoke with her father there. Not of Isle and snow-balls and angels, nor of any of what Aunt Elizabeth would have likely classified as mischief and poor behaviour.
Aunt Laura had looked at her sympathetically, and tucked a new pair of mittens into her coat. “For the morning,” she said softly, her eyes round and kind.
As the days grew again longer, the snow melted away, creeping back slowly from between the old and wizened trees. They retreat was a measured one, bit by bit, as if reluctant to let go of the old orchard and give way to spring. Yet spring came nonetheless, and the last of the snow melted in the face of the warming days. The trees started to bud and leaves appeared again on the branches. Finally, the columbines that Cousin Jimmy spoke of so fondly started to grow again.
The columbines seemed so very delicate to her, and yet they were sturdy enough to come up each year, again and again. Even the frost that struck New Moon late in the spring didn’t kill the flowers, though they might wilt for a few days. Perhaps they were rather like her with her grey-violet eyes and seemingly delicate build. Emily knew she was strong, stronger than most of the Murrays gave her credit for. She had lived this whole year nearly in New Moon, and hadn’t given in to consumption as had been suggested.
Emily thought of the Columbines as fairy-flowers, each blue and purple head unfurling to release magic into the world. She would run out in the mornings, as the sun broke through the still mostly-bare branches of the trees, hoping to see them unfurl and hear their whispers. It was a habit that Aunt Elizabeth didn’t approve of, but as long as Emily saw to the chickens and the cows it was something that was left unremarked on most mornings.
That morning she was sure that she heard it; the whisper of fairy wings departing from the flower. “Did you hear it too wind-woman,” she asked to the breeze about her. It made her so very happy that the wind-woman was here in New Moon with her. In many ways Sal and the wind-woman were her last connections to her old life and her old home. Which, she missed terribly at times, but she thought that her father had yet again known so much more than he had ever imagined.
’You have yet to learn how kind time is’ he had told her, that horrible night that she had learned he was dying. Even now she could remember each moment of that in her mind so very perfectly, Emily was sure she would never forget it.
Time was kind, and so was New Moon and all of its inhabitants. Even Aunt Elizabeth for her stern ways could be kind, she was learning.
“I’m home again father,” she said softly, whispering it to the air and hoping that wherever he was waiting he could hear. “New Moon is my home.”