The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
We found the hällehäll and I showed my pickers the highly technical contrivance I had developed for the work. You take a walnut-sized stone, cover it with a part of the sack, tie a string round the resulting knob, and take a turn round the waist – this leaves both hands free to pick the seedpods. The first few minutes of picking are pretty exciting. You grasp a handful of pods, which on Cytisus battandieri grow like Indian feathered headdresses, and you break them off and stuff them in the sack. As you grasp them you can feel the ripe ones burst inside, and you see the little hard black seeds spatter into the sack. There’s a certain satisfaction in feeling the weight of your sack grow infinitesimally with each handful, maybe a gram. And then a pleasure each time you find a heavily laden plant – you can see the ripe seeds through the almost translucent pods when the sun is low. Your mind clears and you hear all the sounds of nature: the cobras slithering contentedly to and fro in the dry grass, and troupes of monkeys – the Middle Atlas is heaving with monkeys – jabbering in the trees.
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