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“Yes.” I lean forward and stare at the twelve blank spaces making up two words.
“Let’s see how far you can get before our food arrives,” he teases. “What’s your first guess?”
“T.”
“No T.”
“What? Really?” I ask as Etienne draws the head onto the hangman. “What about S?”
“Nope.” He gives the man a body.
“How is that statistically possible?” I grumble. “I’ll try a vowel. I?”
Chuckling, he shakes his head and gives the man an arm.
“E?”
“Got one!” He puts a perfectly formed E in the final space of the first word. “Any guesses on where we’re going yet?”
Chapter 5
Etienne
“What would you like to do first?” I ask, squeezing my little professor’s hand as we stand under the archway to enter the footpath of Greensleeves Orchards. Coming to the orchard, which has been in the O’Connell family for four generations, was a yearly event in my childhood. My little professor didn’t manage to figure out “apple orchard” before our breakfast arrived, but I enjoyed how cute she was guessing.
“Let’s take a hay ride out to pick apples!” She bounces enthusiastically, tugging on my arm.
“Sounds good to me,” I reply, leading us through the crowd to the line for the horse-drawn carriage. “We can pick our bushels then grab a snack.”
She nods happily as I release her hand and wrap my arm around her waist, pulling her against my side. My professor snuggles up against me as we wait to board the hay-filled wagon.
“What are you going to do with your apples?”
“Eat them.” I chuckle.
“But there are so many yummy things you could make! Apple pie, apple sauce, apple turnovers, apple crumble,” she ticks off on her fingers, grinning broadly. “That’s just a few. Then there are recipes like pork with apples or salads with apples. The possibilities are endless.”
“Do you like to cook?”
“I love to bake,” she tells me brightly, giggling.
“I can see you being my little helper in the kitchen,” I lean down and whisper in her ear. I envision her perched on the counter, wearing a bright pink apron and licking a spoon clean.
“That sounds like so much fun,” she says brightly, raising up on tiptoes to kiss my cheek. I can’t help but smile at the act of affection.
We’re soon loaded into the horse-drawn cart and rattling into the orchard. Violet wraps her arm around mine and snuggles in tightly, filling me with a sense of peace and contentment.
“Look at all the apples,” Violet says in awe, then turns to me. “I wonder how many there are?”
“At least a bushel or two.” I grin at her. “Enough for a few apple pies.”
“You think?” She giggles, bouncing in excitement as the cart continues to take us on a tour of the orchard. “How many apples are in a bushel?”
“Around 125.” The driver twists around quickly to smile at us. “It has four pecks, the medium bag size, in them.”
“Really?” Violet asks, obviously interested. Her love of knowledge and learning is definitely something that attracts me to her. “How many apples does a tree normally produce in a year?”
“You can’t have just one tree because they need each other for pollination, but typically around five hundred pounds,” the man says. “Each season is different, depending on the pollination of the flowers.”
