Sour Apples Read Free

Remind me again why I got into this business?”
    “Because you like milk?” Seth joked.
    “I like cows. They don’t talk back,” Joyce responded. “Call me when you know anything. Nice to meet you, Meg—I’ve been meaning to introduce myself for a while, but I never seem to have any free time.”
    “I know the problem. Good to meet you, too, Joyce.”
    Joyce stomped off to her aged pickup truck. The door had a logo on it, something with a cow. Silently, Meg and Seth watched Joyce pull away.
    “What was that about?” Meg finally asked.
    “If you offer me a cup of coffee, I’ll tell you all about it. It’s not hush-hush. If anything, it’s a public matter, involving her land, or rather, the land she leases from the town.”
    “Coffee I can do. I might even have some cookies, if Bree hasn’t eaten them all. But she does work hard, so I guess she earns them. She certainly burns it off.”
    Meg led Seth through the back door into the kitchen and put a kettle on to boil. Seth dropped into one of the chairs at the well-scrubbed round oak table in the middle of the room. “How’re things coming?” he asked.
    “Looking good, I think, and Bree agrees. The trees heldup pretty well over the winter, even with all the snow we had. She’s doing an inventory now, but she didn’t seem too worried. Sometime in here I’m going to have to decide if I want to expand—if I put in new trees now, it’s still going to be a few years before they bear.”
    The kettle boiled, and Meg set about putting ground coffee in her French press and adding the water. When the coffee was ready, she filled two mugs and sat down across from Seth. “So, what’s Joyce’s story? I don’t think I’ve seen her around before, not that I get out all that much myself.”
    “She runs a small dairy operation, maybe thirty or forty head, on the north side of town, just before the ridge this side of Amherst. She grazes all her cattle on the pastures there. It’s really a labor of love for her. She used to be a federal dairy inspector, but she decided that she’d rather be a producer than a bureaucrat, so she and her husband Ethan bought a nice piece of land, with a house and milking barn. She sells organic raw milk and makes some cheese. The regulations for selling raw milk—and calling it organic—are pretty specific, but she knows the ropes.” He stopped to take a swallow of coffee.
    “So what was she complaining about? And why did she come to you? Apart from your recognized role as Granford’s own Mr. Fixit, not to mention an elected selectman.” She smiled at him.
    Seth grinned back. “A couple of years ago Joyce decided she wanted to expand the operation, give herself a little more cushion, without adding staff and facilities. So she came to the town and leased some pasturage that the town owns, and she spent a year improving the field, mostly getting rid of weeds and invasive plants and adding some good feed grass, before turning any cows loose on it. She was thinking long term and she did it right, plus the town gave her a good rate for it, since we weren’t using the land anyway.So, a couple of weeks ago she let out some of her cows for the first time—you should see a herd of cows the first time they get out into a field in the spring! They frolic, there’s no other word for it—and anyway, they’d only been out a couple of days when some of them started getting sick, and one died, so she pulled them off the field. She came to me to complain, since I’m on the town’s board of selectmen, and I can’t say that I blame her.”
    “That’s a shame. Any idea what the problem is?”
    “Not at the moment. The land hasn’t been used for anything for decades, and even though you think I know everything there is to know about Granford, I haven’t memorized the history of each plot of land here. I wasn’t just stalling when I told her that I’d have to do some digging before I could tell her anything about the history of that