Black Bread

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From Easter to early autumn, when the weather was fine and the woods changed colour, we lived on the branches of trees.

We climbed all the trees in the fruit orchard strong enough to take the three of us and low enough to shimmy up without a ladder, and once we’d tested them out we decided on the old plum tree as our permanent base. The old plum tree’s branches were dark and welcoming like the bottom of a cauldron and the fork of its broad trunk with its three branches allowed us to lean back in comfort and divide the space fairly: one apiece.

The tree fork was the place where we met. The branches, on the other hand, were private territory, where we hoarded the things we wanted, and we treated the smaller branches as we felt fit, hung ribbons or paper from the leaves, picked plums to eat, which we weren’t duty-bound to share with our cousins, and we didn’t even have to reply to questions that shot out from neighbouring branches, as if we lived in a sealed chamber with walls of leaves that kept words out.

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