Everyone comes to Ellijay in October. They come for the orchards and the cider donuts and the hayrides and the hoodies, and they're not wrong to. October earns every bit of attention it gets. But the best week in Ellijay — the one nobody's posting about, the one that passes most years without a line at the stoplight — is the week the orchards bloom.
It usually lands in April. Sometimes late March if we've had a warm run, sometimes the first week of May if winter overstayed. You can never quite call it. Apple growers around here have been squinting at the forecast every spring for five generations, and even they'll tell you the trees decide on their own time.
When it happens, it happens fast. One day the hills off 52 are still brown and patient, the long rows of trunks just suggesting themselves through the haze. The next afternoon you're driving past and the whole ridge has turned white. Not snow-white. Not cloud-white. Something softer than that — the color of old linen in afternoon light, miles of it, draped over the shoulders of the hills.
The honeybees show up like they've been holding their breath. Every orchard up here runs hives in the spring, and the hum around a blooming tree at two in the afternoon is a sound you can feel in your sternum. Stand still at the edge of a row and you'll start picking individual bees out of the noise, each one working a flower for exactly as long as it needs to, and then moving on. There is no version of this you see in October. By then the bees have done their work and moved on, too.
I drove past a line of Rome Beauty trees last Saturday with the windows down and had to pull off at the next wide spot just to sit with it. A guy in a truck was already parked there, leaning against his tailgate, eating a sandwich and looking at the same view. Neither of us said anything. There was nothing to say about it that would have helped.
The towns around here all tilt toward the fruit in the fall. That's where the money is, and that's when the calendar asks you to pay attention. But the bloom is the part that isn't for sale. You can't bottle it, you can't put it in a donut, you can't ship it to Atlanta. You can only drive a back road on a weekday afternoon and notice it's happening.
A few quiet things you can do, if you want to be in it without disturbing it.
Take Route 52 east out of town toward Amicalola. The orchards spread out on both sides for miles, and the light on a clear afternoon slants just right through the trees. Go slow. Wave at the farmer who's waving first. If you see a U-pick stand, it's not open — there's nothing to pick yet, and that's the point.
