Winter is all about managing grass and pruning the trees and keeping warm. There’s not so much work for us to do. AJ, Mags and I run screaming through the cold morning air to the bathrooms at the bottom of the hill every morning, play silly games in the hut with old Urb toys that usually have bits missing so we have to be smart to work out new ways to use them, or carve our own bits from wood. We play with little Mango and keep him from burning himself on the stove. Every afternoon we go out to collect the prunings from under the fruit trees and stack them up for firewood. When the weather’s dry, we pull the grass from around the tree trunks. If it’s wet we don’t. The cold bites wet fingers real bad. On wet days, we sit in our shed and beg Gramps for stories about the old times before the famine and what kinds of food he remembers and the real house he lived in when he was a boy. His bathroom was in the house and he had electricity for lights and taps and sinks inside. Mags and AJ think that’s super-cherries. I think they’d both scream if they saw Esmeralda’s house.

Applejoy and I sneak over to Foreman’s house and peek in the windows, coz AJ’s never been in an actual real house that he remembers. I kneel in the garden and let AJ stand on my back to look in the window. When it’s my turn, all I see standing on AJ’s back, is a room with an enormous bed in it and the flash of Foreman’s wife’s hips as she dashes across the window in front of me. She runs out yelling and screaming for us to get out of her yard. We run, heads down so she can’t tell Foreman what we look like, and we hoot and laugh when we are safely back in the orchard.

‘Boz’s bed is as big as our whole shed!’ I tell AJ.

‘That’s coz his wife is as big as a queen,’ AJ says and nods like he thinks Foreman got the bed made specially to fit the hips of his wife.

‘Cha!’ I say and push him over in the wet grass and run down the hill.

Foreman is away from the farm a lot over winter and when I ask him where he goes he says, ‘I’m learning about bees.’

I laugh and say, ‘You already know all the bees.’

He taps the side of his nose and winks.

Foreman is good with people. He’s gruff as a wild billy goat, and sweet as a cherry blossom, and he takes care of his people real good. I’m gonna be just like him.