Pug's Orchard
When business was good, they were generous with their apples
A legacy of giving includes sharing land with neighbors
A woman needs land just like a man does
Already, there are things I know I would change if I could. So much of it is just time. Then, there’s the weather. For the better part of April and almost all of May, it rained. The trees swayed under cloudbursts like women washing their hair, tossing their heads back in the rinse. Pollen gathered in little pools and then dried yellow in halos on the blacktop. For weeks, I worried over the borrowed plot of land in the field across the road, but there was nothing to do about it — nothing to do but wait. “It’s ok,” Mike Shell reassured me, “it’s still early.” May was nearly spent by the time I got my vegetables in the ground. Mike and his wife Sheila are my friends, the first I made when — a few years ago — I moved from my studio apartment in the northwest quadrant of Washington, DC, to a three-bedroom row home in Wise, the deep southwest Virginia town where I was raised. On a whim, I stopped into the general store Mike and Sheila run together in the old wooden apple house on Coeburn …