The Orchard

When Julieta arrived in Tasmania with a working-holiday visa and a backpack, she imagined long walks on the beach and evenings in cozy cafes. Instead, a week later, she was standing in an apple orchard at half past five in the morning, wearing a heavy canvas bag on her chest and shaking with cold.

In Buenos Aires she used to get up at nine, have a slow breakfast and take the bus to her office job at an advertising agency. She was not used to getting up in the dark. On the first morning, she slept through two alarms, and the supervisor, a tall woman called Bev, was waiting for her at the gate with her arms crossed.

The work itself was simple: you climbed a ladder, picked the apples carefully so they didn't get bruised, filled your bag and emptied it into a big wooden bin. The pickers were paid by the bin, not by the hour. On her first day, Julieta filled one and a half bins. A Nepali student called Suman filled six.

"Don't worry," Suman told her at lunch. "Your hands get used to it. In two weeks, you won't even think about it." Julieta didn't believe him. Her back hurt, her arms were scratched and she had dreamed about apples all night.

But slowly, things changed. She started going to bed at nine, like the farmers. She learned to twist each apple instead of pulling it, and to use both hands at the same time. She got used to the cold mornings, to the smell of wet grass and to Bev's loud voice shouting "Gently! They're not potatoes!" across the rows of trees.

She also got used to the people. There were pickers from Taiwan, France, Chile and Germany, and in the evenings they cooked together in the old farmhouse kitchen. Julieta taught them how to make empanadas. Suman taught her a card game she never managed to win.

By the end of the second month, she was filling five bins a day. One morning, Bev stopped at the bottom of her ladder and looked at her bag. "Not bad, Buenos Aires," she said. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to Julieta in weeks.

When the season ended, Julieta went back to the city for a few days. On the first morning, she woke up at five, completely awake, and lay in bed listening to the traffic. She laughed. "I used to hate mornings," she wrote to Suman. "Now I'm not used to sleeping late."