Vocation

By day Lucy worked in a shop that sold local delicacies. Plum jam was the bestseller, due to the freakish proliferation of plums in the local area. People visiting West Tree would always ask about the plums and take tours around the local plum orchards. It was what it was known for.

Lucy knew all there was to know about plums. She could, if asked, describe the reasons for sour skins, sweet skins, hard flesh, soft flesh, bigger stones, smaller stones, juice.

She could hold a jar of plum jam up to the light and say what the weather was like during the week those particular plums were harvested. Pale violet for May, slits of green for June, fair blue with strands of yellow for July.

'If you look carefully you can see these suffered frost bite,' she would say, her bitten fingernails pointing out telltale signs of pre-jam life through the glass jars.

One year, due to a dry summer, no plums grew in West Tree. Lucy got a job in The Old Dog pub. She tried, in vain, to hold pickled eggs up to the light to guess when they were laid. But it wasn't really the same.