The coffee trees on the hillside above the house had been in flower in the spring, and Tadesse had stood among them on the morning the flowers opened and breathed the smell of them, a smell like jasmine but heavier and sweeter, the smell of the blossom that covered every branch of every tree so completely that the hillside appeared, from the lane below, to be lightly covered with snow. The blossom lasted for only a few days before falling, the small white flowers dropping from the branches and covering the ground beneath the trees in a white carpet that dried and darkened over the days after the blossom had passed, and in the days of the blossom Tadesse walked through the plots each morning and breathed the smell and thought about the harvest that would come, the harvest that the blossom was the beginning of, the flower becoming the fruit over the months of the growing season.
He had known from the flowers and from the weight of them on the branches that this year would be a good year. The flowering had been heavy and even across all three plots, the blossoms dense on every branch of every tree, and the evenness of the flowering predicted the evenness of the harvest, the cherries developing simultaneously across the whole farm and ripening in the broad wave that a good year produced rather than the uneven ripening of a poorer year when weather or disease had disrupted the flowering.
Now it was October and the harvest had come, and he rose each morning before the light and stood in the doorway of the house and looked up at the hillside and at the trees against the dark sky, and he thought about the work of the day, the steady particular work of the harvest that he had done every year of his adult life and before that as a child beside his father, learning the work by doing it, his hands learning before his mind had fully understood what the hands were doing.