There she was: seven years old and skinny as a stick, long dark plaits, grey overalls and red jumper. She was clomping along in pink, muddy gumboots through the winter orchard, carrying a pan of softened beeswax as she followed her father down a row of apple trees. He put down his toolbox and kicked a bare patch in the soft soil with the toe of his boot. Then he set the stove on it, turning on the gas and lighting the flame, adjusting it low. Miki placed the pan over the flame before trailing her father to a tree.

He flicked his secateurs from his pocket and got to work, snipping off twigs from last year’s late shoots, cutting them into pencil-lengths. When he’d gathered a handful, he passed them to her and she clutched them in her sticky palm. She liked it when he let her help in the orchard, because most days she was in the kitchen doing lessons. She was old enough to go to school, but her parents were giving her an education in God, which was best done at home. These lessons were delivered at the kitchen table from the large old Bible with its black leather cover, worn by use. There were many dog-eared pages to mark the important bits, and that made the Bible even thicker because every page was important.

Little Miki learned about God while she sat in the house, but he was outside too, she knew this. Mother said God was everywhere, a presence inside her, closer than her breath. But Miki didn’t feel God inside her; she simply felt herself. She was sure God hated the stuffy kitchen as much as she did and preferred to be outdoors where a soul could rise into the sky. She suspected God was in the trees and the wind, in the flowers, in the birds that flew overhead. He would be happier outside than he would be living between the dog-eared pages of a heavy old book full of hard words.

Miki loved being out among the gnarly old-man trees, and she loved to watch her father with his knife, the precise way he performed his cuts. He pulled a handsaw from his toolbox and hacked a branch from the tree and let it drop to the ground. With his stone-sharpened work knife, he made a notch in the fresh-cut stump. Miki passed him a twig, which he whittled to a sharp point and inserted into the notch then wrapped the join with tape. As he sawed off another branch, she handed over her last two twigs.