When baby-picking season comes around, Meredith says we should go, says it’ll be fun to pick newborns off trees, fill buckets with them. We can make a whole day of it.
We’ve just graduated from college, and our lives stretch infinitely before us, the relative freedom of youth still on our side. Neither of us has ever been to a baby orchard before, so I agree, curious to see what it’s like. Another life experience. That’s what we said all through college. Fail a test? Life experience. Get too drunk? Have a bad date? Just more life experiences.
At the baby orchard, the orchardist tells us that we came at a good time. He makes small talk, says that business isn’t what it used to be. Fewer people with interest in babies nowadays. We don’t tell him that we aren’t interested in the babies, that we’re only interested in the experience.
The picking is easy, and our buckets fill up fast with chubby, noisy, smelly babies. We’ve heard that some people go baby picking every year—tradition—but neither Meredith nor I can imagine that. It reminds me of summer camp years ago, collecting lightning bugs in jars, then letting them go a few minutes later. Just to try it. Just for the experience. Didn’t need to do it again.
When we’re done, we ask the orchardist what we should do with the babies, where we should leave them.
What do you mean? he says. They’re yours, you take ’em home. You can’t put a baby back once you’ve plucked it off a tree. Why else would you come to a baby orchard?
And the one thing Meredith and I both know from our life experiences is that there is no correct way to answer that question.
Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and writing coach whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Moon City Review, Milk Candy Review, and Ghost Parachute, among others. Her work was selected for Best Microfiction 2025 and Best of the Net 2025.
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