She comes to my house to make clove oranges, because we read about it in a book. The title has been lost to time, now, but I assume it was one among a serious of fantasy books filled with suitable amounts of raciness and random medieval factoids, since those were the sorts of things we liked to read, then. Skirts lifting and music twirling and characters lost in a fantastic adventureland in a place far away that feels so close, all at the same time. And in this book, people made clove oranges, so we decided we had to do it too.

It was raining, water streaming off the roof and making that ‘glomp, glomp, glomp’ sound it makes when the gutters are so full that they can’t even begin to contain the flood, downspots clogged with rain and small pieces of tree debris, spewing out water full steam. The water collection tank was overflowing, liquid pouring over the sides and reminding me of Archimedes in his bathtub.

Cloves, as it turned out, were expensive, and I had a limited supply, with a small sack of juicy, bright orange fruits; it wasn’t until years later that I learned that oranges are often yellow or green, and they are dyed to satisfy the demands of consumers, who think they should be orange, always orange. I thought I’d selected my fruit with a careful eye for the best colour, and she brought a basket of ribbons, because they were somehow involved in clove oranges, at least according to our book. They were stiff, with gold trim, I remember that, the trim sparkling.

We sat crosslegged on the floor in my bedroom, beeswax tapers burning around us for authenticity, and studied the piles of cloves and the oranges and the ribbons and tried to figure out how they all went together. Picking up one and then the other, I tilted my head and tried to remember the scene in the book, the exchange of the orange, a hidden kiss, perhaps, in a dark hallway.

‘I think,’ she says, licking her lip with the corner of her tongue like she always did when she was concentrating especially hard, ‘that you poke the long end of the cloves in? So the orange is studded with them.’ She demonstrates, and the clove falls out, so she prods it in again, sharply, and this time it stays put. I pick up a piece of ribbon and spin it listlessly in my hand for a moment, and she suggests that I wrap it around my orange and make a little row of cloves along it. This, as I later discovered, is apparently an authentic Thing One Does when making clove oranges. No less an authority than Martha Stewart assured me of this, one day when I was lying dully on my bed looking at the endless whiteout outside and wondering if life was worth living at all.

Her orange was neatly arrayed with cloves in a twinkling. She always had such clever fingers, neat and small and tight and tidy, gentle but also very strong. Mine is a tangled mass of slipping ribbon and uneven cloves, my fingers sticky with orange oil and pith. I finally give up and start eating my orange, starting the peel with a flick of my knife and popping out sections while I watch her work. She is so intent that she has not yet noticed that I have abandoned the endeavor altogether, fascinated by smooth fingers darting along the bright orange rind.

The house feels moist and heavy. It has been raining for days, the yard is a river of muddy, murky water and we had to pry the front door out of its grossly swollen frame so she could get inside. Even then, it only opened partway across the floor and she scuttled through sideways, crablike, shaking her umbrella just out the door and tapping her feet sharply to loosen the attached mud, hanging her neat woolen coat on the wall by the door, where worn hooks shedding small flakes of rust wait for people like her to arrive. The nasturtiums trembled with the occasional gusts of wind and my father vanished upstairs to huddle in his bed, reading.

Her next orange is recalcitrant, thick, knobbly rind, and she has to push hard to get the cloves in. Almost inevitably, it seems, her fingers prod too hard and the rind cracks open, the momentum of her fingers pushing hard into the orange, which is, of course, heavy with juice. Juice and that fine spray that appears when you breach the rind shoots out, bedecking her neat skirt and splattering pulp across her face.

‘Oh, bother,’ she says, while the scent of orange oil hovers, heavy, in the air around us. A piece of my discarded peel skuds across the floor in a sudden spurt of wind, lodging itself in a pile of hot beeswax and releasing a pungent odor before curling in on itself and becoming a waxy parody of an orange peel.

‘You’ll ruin your skirt,’ I say, imagining blotches of oil smearing across the pattern, staining. ‘You’d better blot it,’ and she stands up and unzips it, zipper sticking awkwardly at that point it always did, where she had to yank it and usually the skirt slid halfway past her knees in the process, fabric pooling around her feet.

‘Oh? We wouldn’t want that, now would we?’ And the candles gutter in the draft and the oranges roll across the floor, where one will secret itself until the desk until I find it, months later, shriveled and shedding its tiny, neat rows of cloves, as though it is winking at me.