Apples, potatoes, onions on the shelves, layered in clean straw. Potatoes cold as river stones. The onions, even chilled, are freshly pungent under their papery skins, which he rubs his thumb against, smarting his eyes. He begins to fill the bags. A few yellow Early Victoria apples, still firm. The flat, hand-fulling Bramley’s Seedlings: blushed, green cookers. His late Pig’s Nose Pippins, streaked red over green. Though dull on the trees, the colors of the Bramleys and Pig’s Noses have gone vibrant, ripening as they keep. The flavors of apples, he recalls, are said to reflect their season: summer apples refreshing, August apples tasting of strawberries. Early fall apples taste of melon and wine, those ripe in late fall of honey. He chooses one and bites into it, aromatic juice bursting against his tongue, mellifluous.

The honey is there, before him, five translucent pints lined up, amber to the rim, their glass tops clamped. He picks up a jar, tilts it; the honey has not crystallized but it is too cold to budge. He sets the jar carefully inside one of the burlap sacks, resting it against the shoulders of apples, and leaves the cellar.

The house still waits, humming and patient. He walks the still corridors, hesitantly browsing, a visitor, intensely aware of each step on the staircase, the turn in the landing that leads to his closed study, Frieda’s little room with its bright rug, the cribs both gone. The mirror that he passes in the hall, his silvered shadow sliding by; the guest room, their bedroom (he does not enter either), and Sylvia’s study: her thick elm desk that he made for her at its place under the window. His house, her house, is anything but silent, thrumming in basso profundo with their halted life, their marriage. He turns toward the stairs, the ache of her keening constricting in his chest—at her desk, those months alone, in blue light. The ground beneath the serried orchard covered with unharvested fruit, all those fallen apples reminding her, with their honeyed scent, of the waste. The beehive so slow now in the orchard’s cold, suspended, all of it, in universal snow.

He needs her curtain material. In the playroom, in the cupboards he built, he finds stacks of washed, ironed, exactingly folded fabric, as neat as the linens in the closet upstairs, as the shelves in the meticulous larder. He pries her remaining red corduroy from the stack, fumbling with the other yardage as he lifts to keep them as straight as she has left them.

There had always been so much to be done. This idleness is perhaps the most strange, the most surreal, his standing helpless in his house, hapless, his task so quickly accomplished, the buildings and the rooms taken care of, efficiently defended, the fallow garden, the weathered trees under their custodial cushion of pristine, blue snow, self-contained.