Beams of golden sunlight came down before me in twos and threes, peeking out from between the trees. Each one wore a different face that swirled and shifted with the soft currents of the breeze. Dancing down the neatly spaced orchard trees, the spirits of the autumn blinked and winked at me, welcoming me home.

This orchard was the only part of my family’s land that continued to produced fruit every year with or without coaxing. Passed down from great-great-grandfather, to great-grandfather, to grandfather, and then when he had only girl children, he left the vineyard to my mother. She had no interest in wine or working the land and this once prosperous vineyard idled in the autumn sun. The ancient grape vines that hadn’t been tended in thirty years were rotting on the hillside, eaten away by bugs and boars.

My mother, retired from her job teaching literature at the university, sat on the garden patio, smoking and drinking brandy. When she wasn’t glaring out at the vines, she jotted notes in a student’s exercise book. They were the stories she had always wanted to tell but didn’t dare. Now they remained trapped behind her pen, held back by years of academic rigors and regimes.

I returned to the run-down vineyard every autumn since my mother had moved back in. The old house though in disrepair, was a retreat from paper-writing and library research. My mother was less than companionable. She opened only the bottom half of the house for use: a bedroom, an office, a guest bedroom. Most of the year it was her and her large Saint Bernard, Charlie. I visited for two weeks during the university break. My brother and his family came every spring, during the April vacation. Mom could have had plenty of visitors: retired colleagues, former students, neighbors willing to work the old vineyard for two-thirds of the proceeds, but instead she shut herself away. Something about the house and the land worked a mysterious gloom over her, and aside from everyday errands, she forgot about the outside world.

When I arrived this year, like every year, I took Charlie for morning walks among the orchard. Air spiced with winter, was warmed in the sun. I breathed it in deeply, and dissertation deadlines slipped away. The neighboring vineyards and farms were burning away a year’s growth. A thick haze of purple-blue smoke covered the side of the mountain and the valley below, and in the mornings when the sun was strongest, the spirits of the autumn would gather in the orchard. They were rays of golden sunlight swirling through the morning mists, but under the apple and pear trees they took on startling, faint forms of people; my ancestors and the ancestors of past families who worked this land before it was left to fend for itself. I never recognized the faces, but when a wind ruffled the fading leaves, I could have sworn I saw a few lips move in the glinting light. Within the delicate rustle, I’d hear murmured greetings, friendly chatter like the sounds of migrant fruit pickers humming gypsy tunes from within the branches of the trees.

The morning sun hit directly on the face of the mountain, rising on the opposite side of the valley and filtered through the leaves. Entering the orchard was like entering some holy place dedicated to forgotten gods. Gods who had not yet understood they were forgotten, or didn’t care. Charlie bounded in and out of the beams of light, disrupting the spirits who joined us on our morning walk. A breeze passed overhead, as they flickered in and out of existence alongside Charlie’s antics, and I could hear a suggestion of laughter, the hazy, undefined faces full of joyous expressions.

The Saint Bernard was getting old, almost fifteen, but on these walks he was filled with youthful energy. I gathered apples that had fallen from the trees and were not too bruised to be eaten. As the smoke grew thicker and the sun higher, the two of us walked back to the house. My watch said it was nearing ten o’clock, but I was not surprised that I had spent two hours wandering beneath the trees. That orchard could make you lose track of the time.

At the house, my mother sat on the patio. She had a cup of black coffee half finished, still steaming, in a mug. The spiral notebook was sitting open on the table, an uncapped pen dropped across it. She was smoking a cigarette.

“I have apples.” I placed my basket on the table and sat down in the empty chair next to her.

“It’s the only thing that grows here anymore.”

“You could sell the vineyards.”

“Don’t you start, Julia. Your brother’s constant pressuring to sell to developers is bad enough.”

“What about Gustav? He’s willing to tend the vines for two-thirds-”

“No.” Mom cut me off with a sharp motion of her hand. Then she took a drag from her cigarette.

I reached for the pack that was sitting on the table and lit a cigarette of my own. Mom looked like she was about to tell me to put it out. Her jaw was tight and frown lines had appeared around her eyes. She watched my movements; inhaling the smoke and exhaling in a long release that seemed only to increase the space between us. The smoke caught the sunlight and swirled in a puffy yellow-grey ball for a moment and then drifted up to the sky on a passing current. I thought I caught a glimpse of something winking at me; a face inside the puff, but it was only an instant. I flicked my attention to Mom who was also watching the smoke dissolve into the sky. With the cigarette poised just higher than her lips, she asked, “How was it? The orchard.”

“There are spirits there,” was my unchecked reply. I expected Mom to sneer and make a crass remark about the apples or cleaning up after Charlie. She took another puff on her cigarette and stamped it out in the ashtray. Then she picked up her pen and started writing; slowly her hand formed words with deliberate force.

I finished my cigarette, watching her write. The gaze of an audience may have disturbed most people, but for my mother it was as if I wasn’t there. When she sat here, the bubble she lived in was impenetrable. It was her, the vines, her cigarettes, and in the afternoons, her brandy. She filled one page in a halting rhythm, tore it out and crumpled it up. It sat on the table, threatening to blow away at any moment as she started on a fresh, clean page. The rest of the day would pass this way. A slow pile of ripped and crumpled pages – some filled, some only with a word or two – would accumulate in a little mound on the table. Sometimes the wind would blow them off and Charlie might chase after them. When that happened, Mom stamped into the house and brought out the little waste-basket she kept by the patio door. But never until then did she give the wasted paper any attention.

Agitated, I slapped my hands on my thighs and sat back against the chair with a sharp exhale. Mom ignored me the way she ignored the house, the land, everything that brought back memories of an earlier life. Sometimes I thought retirement had made her feel useless, but the bitter, angry stares she gave the vines had me thinking it was frustration at the loss of youth and vigor. She resented that they continued to thrive with or without help every year, while she had yet to save an ink-filled page from the fireplace. The mist and smoke was lifting from the valley now and the light shifted to a bright yellow as the day began to warm. The never-ending breeze rustled the paper on the table, but had little else to say. I didn’t want another vacation to pass like all the others, silent and sour.

“Come for a walk with me and Charlie tomorrow,” I said breaking the hesitant sound of her pen and the far off crackle of burning wood.

Mom dropped the pen onto the notebook and lit another cigarette. Never looking at me, she shifted her gaze to the acres of land stretched below us, all the way down to the orchard at the end of the vineyard.

“Mom,” I said.

“Keep your apples,” she said. “And your spirits. I have writing to do.”

Charlie, sitting at her feet gave a little whine and stretched out his paws in front of him. Without taking her eyes off the vines, Mom reached down to rub his head. She waved me away with her other hand- the one that held the cigarette. I picked up my basket of apples and went into the house. Before I closed the patio door I brought out the waste basket and thumped it down next to her chair, sweeping the crumpled paper into it. Mom flinched, her eyes flashed for a moment to my tense lips, but her expression didn’t change. She picked up her pen and held it ready, over the next sheet of paper.

When I closed the door behind me, I felt a warm wind slip through and brush my cheek. There was a soft whistle and laughter that echoed a beckoning call.

I came out of the bedroom the next morning, pulling a sweater over my head, and Mom was standing by the door. Charlie was pacing slowly back and forth, waiting for someone to let him out. I raised my eyebrows at my mother, but didn’t expect an explanation.

“Let’s see what your spirits have to say,” she said half-mocking.

Mom opened the door and let in the morning light and the smell of burning brush. Charlie raced outside and let out a yelp as he ran through the vines, heading straight toward the orchard. We followed at a slower pace, without any words. As we walked through the vines, I rubbed my hands together two or three times to start the circulation. The clear autumn sun was warm, but the air was cold in the hazy smoke. The same odd paradox.

It took fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to walk down the hill to the orchard. Charlie wove through the vines at the bottom of the hill waiting for us, while my mom kept pace beside me. She smoked a cigarette, glared at the vines as we passed by, and brushed some ash off her scarf.

“When was the last time it rained here?” I asked.

“August. There was a storm. It made a mess.”

There was nothing more to say. I could see dried rivulets and two month old deposits of mud that should have been cleared away from the orderly rows.

At the edge of the orchard, Mom paused. Even Charlie, who usually ran into the rays of light, barking to greet his unearthly friends, stared into the trees silently.

The daylight was deep, burning gold, the air was thick, and the spirits had come out in force. They were waiting for us under the orchard canopy. In clusters of thick beams, blinking in the smoke swirling around them. A stillness, a suggestion of wonder captured in their faces. There were hundred of individual rays of light radiating through the leaves and the orchard was a golden temple set ablaze in the morning sun.

Mom’s cigarette burned down to the filter, but she didn’t drop it. I saw her tap the last of the ash off the end and tuck it into her pocket. As if to leave behind any trace would be a defilement of this moment.

She muttered a “Hello” to the faint faces and then entered the orchard, passing through a curtain of sunlight so thick I could feel it on my fingertips, its warmth breathing over my skin. The outlines of spirit-figures parted for her, fading into simple beams as she passed by. Charlie walked in the shadows occasionally nipping at a fallen, bruised apple. I followed behind them, observing the golden aura that fell softly around my mother, like a silken veil.

Murmuring to the light, her voice was soft, calmer than I had heard it in years. Her face was serene and youthful; wrinkles and lines only hinted at her age. Underneath this peaceful, regenerated expression, her golden veil, I saw a young girl playing hide and seek in the branches of the trees. I saw a teenager meeting her boyfriend for a clandestine kiss. A breeze passed through the leaves and the rays of sunlight shifted, startling the spirits who walked with us among the trees. I didn’t hear laughter and merry, indistinct chatter. This time there was the faintest melody, a chorus of voices singing a forgotten lullaby.

Mom was silent now, hands in her pockets. I could see one of them fidgeting inside the fabric, fingering her cigarettes. But she was staring off into the trees, up into the leaves, listening. Her mouth seemed to form unconscious words that played in time to the music rustling in the branches. She had a look of joyous surprise I’d never seen before, as if recalling something so long lost. I walked at my own pace a short distance away, in circular patterns around each trunk, incapable and unwilling to say anything. All the spirits’ attention was focused on my mother. In rich, golden light – the aura – they seemed to have gathered around her with rapturous and glowing faces.

It was past ten when we started back up the hill the house. I hadn’t collected any apples, preferring to leave them on the ground as an offering to the spirits of that morning. Mom pulled a cigarette out of the pack in her pocket and set it between her lips. With the lighter half raised, cupped in her hand she said:

“They were angels. Sent down from Heaven.”

That spring, I got a call from my brother after he had ended his yearly vacation and returned to his real estate business. “I don’t know what you said to Mom,” he told me. “She takes walks with Charlie in the mornings and writes in her office in the afternoons. She’s given up brandy. Gustav from next door is replanting the vines.”

Whatever they were – spirits of our ancestors, the angels of the orchard – they had spoken to my mother that autumn morning. Her eyes lost their sour gaze when she looked at the vines, and were filled with sparkling, unlocked stories that sought out the pages of her unfilled notebooks. When I’d left that fall, the only sound I heard was the unending caress of pen to paper, like the fluttering of a fragile gold silk as it falls to the ground.