Coffee Before the Trucks Arrive

The trucks come a little after six. I am in Kapana at ten past, at the small café on the corner where the chairs are still stacked and the owner is out front with a rag and a hose. He puts the cup down without asking. Six years of Mays and we have spoken maybe forty sentences in total.

I sit outside even when it is cold. The street is being washed. A man goes past with a dog that has no interest in anything. I open the notebook and copy last night's numbers out of my phone: temperature at the cut, time, weight of petals in, weight of oil out. Numbers I already know, written again, because writing them starts the day.

The Hour Nobody Wants

At six in the morning the old town belongs to nobody. The cobbles are wet, the shutters are down, and the only people working are the ones who will be invisible by ten. I like it more than I like most things. It is the one half hour when nobody asks what I think of their oil, and I am not yet the person who says no.

I do not talk before the first cup. The roses do not require conversation either.

I came into this at nineteen, sorting petals for a season because my aunt knew someone who needed hands. I was supposed to do something else; I had the grades for it, and my father had opinions. Then the first week ended and I noticed I could tell two batches apart by smell alone, and that was that. The rest I learned slowly, on the wet floor.

The notebook is not sentimental. It is evidence. When a distiller swears his fire was low, I open it to a page from three years ago and read out what I wrote then. The page does not raise its voice. Neither do I. That is the whole trick of being thirty in a room full of men who have done this since before I was born.

The Last Week of May

In the last week the yard empties. The trucks come less often, the stills cool down, and the smell thins out until the building is just a building with a wet floor. I am glad. I am also a little lost, the way you are lost when a noise you had stopped hearing stops.

The season does not end with the last flower. It ends with the first morning you forget to check the wind.

I go up the hill on a Sunday with no notebook. The city is loud below and the wind does what it does. Somewhere down there a barrel is being filled and somebody is arguing about the cut. I will hear about it tomorrow. Today I cannot smell a single rose, and it is the best I have felt in a month.