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Agatha’s Point of View
Pruning lemon trees became my guilty pleasure.
Pleasure because it put me alone in the grove where, for the first time in my life, I had thinking time. Real thinking time — the kind where a sentence arrives whole, and you stand still with the secateurs open and let it settle before you lose it.
I was writing as much as I was pruning, if I was honest. I kept a pencil behind my ear and a notebook in my back pocket, and every third cut I stopped and scribbled something down and then forgot what I’d been pruning.
The guilty part was because my front door and the Taverna door were both open from dawn to dusk, and there was a constant flow of women in and out. I could hear them from the grove — voices carrying up from the kitchen, the scrape of furniture being moved, the occasional crash followed by laughter and a stream of Sicilian that I was learning to interpret by volume rather than vocabulary.