On trips to the farmers market, Ruth would pass the beautiful pyramids of polished fruit and walk directly to the discounted crate of bruised, misshapen apples. Emily hated it when she was young. Other children bought caramel apples that shone beneath plastic wrap, while her grandmother examined scuffed skins and negotiated for a box that looked as if somebody had dropped it down a staircase. Ruth sorted everything carefully at home, saving sound fruit for sauce and pies and sending fruit with deep rot or mold to the compost heap. Nothing went into food merely because she disliked waste.
"Why not buy the nice ones?" Emily had asked one evening, watching Ruth trim a bruise from an apple.
Ruth paused with the paring knife in her hand. "Because the fruit doesn't know it's supposed to be worth less. People decided that. Nature never did."
At eight, Emily had been more interested in the cinnamon Ruth was sprinkling over the sliced apples. At twenty-four, standing beneath the neglected orchard trees, she heard the sentence as if Ruth had said it that morning. She understood that her grandmother had not been talking only about fruit. Ruth had made a life out of recognizing usefulness and dignity in things others overlooked. Emily could not say whether her own life was being wasted, but she knew she had spent several years learning how to make other people believe things she no longer believed herself.
She went back to Rochester and tried to return to work. On Monday she joined a meeting about a new marketing campaign. The room was bright, the coffee expensive, and everyone spoke with the same polished urgency they had used the previous month. Her manager praised a slogan Emily had written, then asked her to make it sound more authentic. She heard herself saying that she would see what she could do. Something about those words made her think of Ruth in the kitchen, asking whether an apple was really worth less just because somebody said so.
That evening she opened a spreadsheet and calculated what she had saved. The number was not impressive enough to finance a grand dream. She had about sixteen thousand dollars after paying her student loan minimums and setting aside the amount she owed on her lease. She could survive a few months if she was careful, perhaps longer if the farmhouse cost less to operate than a city apartment. She wrote expenses in one column and guesses in another, then crossed out every estimate that depended on everything going right.
Two days later she gave notice. Her manager assumed she had accepted a better job and asked whether the agency could match the offer. Emily tried to explain that there was no offer. She had inherited a farm. She wanted to see whether she could make something of it before deciding what to do next.