Make A Wish
I’m going to tell you a secret

My late mother was full of superstitions. Not dangerously so, mind you — they were almost entirely harmless, apart from her belief that everything in life depended on luck. Although when I look at her own life, it was a good one, and there was a lot of what she would call good luck about it. So maybe she was on to something after all.
She would insist to us children that on the first day of any month, before we said anything else, we must say Rabbits! to bring ourselves luck. No matter that a month is an arbitrary and variable division of time that no longer even approximately matches the lunar cycle it was supposed to reflect; no matter that other people said White Rabbits!, or said nothing, or thought the idea was a bit cracked; and certainly, no matter that she could not explain how the mention aloud of crepuscular lagomorphs would bend the universe to our unexpressed will. We said Rabbits! every month. Sometimes I still do, if I remember.
Make a wish, she would say, on an auspicious occasion. The wish could be anything, the most important thing about it being that it must be made silently and kept secret, because a wish once divulged could never come true (the exact opposite of a curse, which never works unless the cursee knows about it). And what makes an auspicious occasion? Once more, almost anything. When you see a black cat. When you drop a fork on the floor. And oh, yes, the first time you eat a particular thing in a new year, you can make a wish: so again, the arbitrary time-division, and again, the importance of primacy. She, and therefore we, used to make a lot of wishes in early January.
Now, there are some annual firsts that are not first because of their proximity to a recent post-solstice celebration. The picture above is of the first ripe apple of my harvest this year, so it meets Mum’s criterion. As I cut into it, I hoped it would be properly ripe, and as tasty as last year’s, and that there would be plenty more like it to keep me going through the winter; and I remembered Mum’s habit, and made a wish.
It was ripe, and it was tasty. It was just what the doctor ordered. The name of the variety escapes me right now, but I can tell you that one of its characteristics is that delightful pinkening of the flesh that you can see on the right. It’s even better in real life than in my snapshot. It was an almost perfect apple: I say almost because of the ominous brown stain in the core. A moth had laid an egg or two there when that was a flower, and a grub, not visible in the cut, was now thinking about getting out into the big wide world. I have to say I helped it along a little with that aim.
I wish I’d sprayed the tree in February.
