FROM THE LONGING ORCHARD: Excerpt

May 28, 2023 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

FROM THE LONGING ORCHARD

Eighteen-year-old Sonya Hudson has been gripped by phobia since she was thirteen. What would make navigating the world so difficult for this budding visual artist? When the story opens, she lives with her mother and her sister in a suburb in New York in the late 1970s. The narrative carries us back through her childhood, where she struggles with the family’s frequent moving and with her parents’ increasingly fraught marriage. Lingering at the periphery of her consciousness is the shadow of a damaged boy she knew when she was very young. Reverence for the natural world provides comfort, as does her fierce attachment to her sister and her parents’ poignant guidance. But it is the intimacy with another young woman that ultimately offers a path to healing.

From the Longing Orchard shows us the ways in which a young woman and those she loves all must contend with a longing of some kind and how they seek from each other, and sometimes find, the needed balm.

We are delighted to feature this excerpt!

That night Sonya had trouble sleeping. She went to the window and glanced out over the hushed street. There were just a few outside lights on, and new leaves around them cast shadows over the front lawns. The sky was cloudy. She opened the window and knelt before it, heard some leaves flapping. The musty spring smell of rain coming and rich mud brought to mind the stream in Bridgeville. The bank had oozed clay where she and Lois waded on that summer day, a moist seam from the shoulder-high steep, a discovery. It slid down thick, gray, and textured in their hands. The day before, shopping with their mother, they had read an ad for a facial mud-pack in a woman’s magazine at the grocery store. After discussing the possibilities, they put their sneakers aside in the grass and reached into the mud-clay swath with both hands. They began at their knees and applied it in substantial slabs, hands full, heft and smell making them giddy, until they were covered from the neck down, even their shorts and T-shirts. They eased themselves, sitting first, then onto their backs in the sun along the bank and waited for it to dry.“If it’s for our bodies, then it isn’t called a facial, is it?” Lois asked. “No, I guess not. I don’t know what it would be called.” When the clay had lightened and cracked, they dipped into the stream, held themselves up leaning back on their hands. They felt it slip slowly from their skin, rinse through their clothes, and watched the clay filter away, cloud the water.

“It tingles,” Sonya said.

“Maybe that’s our pores juvenating,” Lois said.

“Rejuvenating,” Sonya remembered from the ad. They retrieved their sneakers and walked home, their clothes dripping silt, and were surprised their mother could not see the difference in their skin.

“We can feel it.”

“We look so new.”

Their mother still did not see the difference, and, somewhat annoyed, hoping their clothes would not be stained, said, “Get in the shower.”

Now Sonya smelled the back of her hand, air through the screen, and thought about the smell of mud. All streams becoming rivers, all rivers sift- ing their banks gradually over flat beds out to a sea someone lived along. The mouth of the river, that was the word, the opening, the confluence, join- ing and then moving forward renewed into a larger body of water. In every civilization people bending to the river, to water, bringing it to their faces, calling it home, so rich it was with possibility. A tent by a sea someone had, and lay awake at night and listened, smelled the water, filled with longing. Then she slipped into bed and fell asleep.

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Jessica Jopp grew up in New York State. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. From the Longing Orchard is her first novel. Also an award-winning poet, Jopp has published her work in numerous journals, among them POETRY, The Texas Observer, Seneca Review, and Denver Quarterly. Her poetry collection The History of a Voice was awarded the Baxter Hathaway Prize in Poetry from Epoch, and it was published in January 2021 by Headmistress Press. Jopp teaches in the English Department at Slippery Rock University. She lives in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where she is on the board of a non-profit working to protect a community woodland.