There was a little church that sat, slightly tilted, on a plain before a hill with an orchard. The orchard of old twisted peach and persimmon trees covered most of the little hill, except for a very small pasture with an old nanny goat and a raggedy mule and a rough place on top of large red granite boulders and a well, surrounded by an elegantly carved wall. Not one of the members of the little church could remember how the elegantly carved wall came to be.
The husband of the orchard was a very old man. He tended his orchard, milked his goat, fought with his mule and took care of the little, slightly tilted church. He had just one son. His wife had died from a fall from a blue ladder. She was picking the ripe astringent, trout roe-colored persimmons. She tumbled head after heel down the little hill, becoming still just at the back corner of the little church; her old neck broken, its sweet undulating topography unchanged.
The couple's only son ran to his mother. He lay beside her and sobbed, throwing ripe persimmons against the autumn sun. They disappeared, then plopped, bursting on the split shake roof of the slightly tilted little church. The old man could not console his son. Since the day he could giggle at his own burps he would roll peaches and persimmons down the hill. He would gleefully shout after them; complimenting those that just touched the church, reprimanding those that crashed into it or rolled past. The old man told his old friends that the boy would now do nothing, not even roll peaches or persimmons after watching his mother tumble head after heel down the little hill.
