Orchard Inside the Weather Station

At the hilltop weather station, glass panes sweat with basil. Anemometers sleep like thin birds, wings folded in rust. Inside, apricot saplings lift their wrists toward cracked skylights. Rain writes Morse on the roof no one answers.

The old pressure charts hang like pale tides on the wall, curves climbing, falling, climbing, a remembered pulse. Someone penciled "storm" beside a date thirty years gone; now ladybugs patrol the margin in red uniforms.

At noon, heat gathers in the gauges and softens the numbers. Tomatoes glow in jars where mercury once trembled. Wind enters through a broken vent, carrying hay and diesel, and every leaf turns once, as if listening for its name.

By evening the station lamp fills with moths and green scent. Beyond the fence, tractors move like ships through dark wheat. The valley exhales; frost begins at the ditch. In this borrowed observatory, fruit learns the language of weather.