A Year on Ladybug Farm #1

by Donna Ball

  “Exactly.” Delores tapped a clause on the document with a sharp red fingernail. “All written down plain as day in paragraph 12-A.” She flipped over a page. “Heirs and assigns, fair use of property . . . okay look at paragraph 15, term of contract. We talked about your agreement to give this situation a year before reassessing. We still good with that?”

  She glanced around the table, and received three nods. “Okay, so at the end of a year, any one of you can offer your share of the property to any of the other two, or jointly agree to offer the entire property for sale to a third party at a mutually agreed upon price, or renegotiate this agreement or any part thereof in any way you choose. Understand?”

  “It all sounds so lawlerly,” complained Lindsay.

  “Can’t help it, dearie. I’m a lawyer. Now I need a date of termination. Shall we say January first?”

  They consulted each other with a questioning glance, and shrugged. “Sure.” “Suits me.” “Sounds fine.”

  Delores scrawled the date on her copy of the contract, while Sheryl went around the table and did the same to everyone else’s. “Okay, ladies, get out your pens. Let the signing begin.”

  Six minutes and a flurry of signatures later, they all sat back and looked at each other in a kind of stunned astonishment. Just like that, it was over.

  And it had just begun.

  Spring

  Starting Over

  5

  Moving On

  Nine months to the day from the evening they had spent at the Holiday Inn with two laptops, a bottle of wine, and a legal pad between them, making their plans, a caravan of shiny SUVs pulled into the rutted and overgrown gravel drive that led to Blackwell Farm. They were loaded down with suitcases, pots and pans, nonperishable food items, art supplies, tools, pillows, linens, photo albums, electronics, toiletries, and all of those essential items that one snatches first from a house fire and refuses to trust to the movers. They had been driving for five hours, but the journey had taken most of a lifetime.

  Lindsay, leading the procession, stopped fifty feet into the drive, sprang out of the car, and opened the back hatch. Bridget pulled in behind her, followed by Cici. From the top of a pile of boxes that was almost over her head, Lindsay slid a large, colorfully painted sign out of the van. Bridget came up quickly to help her. Between them, they carried the sign back to the end of the drive, followed by Cici with the hammer.

  “Left,” Bridget advised, standing back as they positioned the sign in the midst of the weeds where the drive met the road. “No, left and back about three feet. It’s too close to the driveway.”

  “There’s a big rock.”

  “Leave room for the flower bed.”

  “How about here?”

  “It’s crooked. Go back a little.”

  “There’s a ditch there!”

  “Wait, I can do this . . .”

  Straddling the ditch, Lindsay held the sign while Cici hammered it into the ground. “We’ll set it in cement later,” Cici said, and they joined Bridget to admire their work.

  Cut in a sweeping scroll design, the sign was painted pastel yellow and decorated with three bright ladybugs. In flowing script, the lettering said, Welcome to Ladybug Farm.

  The three shared a grin and a high five, and hurried back to their cars.

  They had seen the house in November for a final walk-through before finalizing their offer, but had not been back since. They pulled their three cars in a semicircle in front of the house and got out one by one. They stood there for a moment in silence, taking it all in.

  The good news was that the surroundings were even more beautiful in the spring than they had been in August when they had first toured the house. Baby grass the color of a chiffon ball gown swept in graceful arcs and curves around the house, and the red clover and yellow dandelions that dotted it were like colorful embroidery. The pear trees in the orchard were covered in snowy blossoms, and the apple trees were just beginning to show their pink flowers. The giant tulip poplars that surrounded the house were alight in brilliant green, and the big white flowers for which the trees were named were just beginning to unfurl. There was a crazy quilt of purple Siberian iris and bright yellow daffodils spilling across the path that led to the dairy, and the dairy itself was draped in purple clusters of fragrant wisteria. Wild dogwoods dotted the face of the distant mountains, which faded from dark to light in shades of blue and green.

  The bad news was that winter had not been kind, either to the house or the yard. A hickory branch, big enough to be a small tree, had fallen on the barn, taking out part of the roof and one of the loft doors. A pile of sodden leaves and a network of thorny vines had blown onto the front porch, and mossy green mildew decorated the railings. The paint on the steps had flaked up in huge hunks, and there was more wood showing on the white columns than paint. The multigabled roof of the house had an odd, patchy appearance, and it took them a moment to realize that that was because quite a few of the clay tiles were missing. Rows of naked windows gazed down upon them like so many empty, forlorn eyes. A panel of torn screen on the little side porch flapped forlornly in the breeze.

  Dead vines clung to the brick chimney and stretched their parasitic fingers toward the upstairs windows. As Lindsay’s dismayed eyes followed the path of the vines upward, she was struck by something odd. “Look at that,” she said, pointing.

  “Look at what?”

  “That top window there. The curtain is closed.”

  “So it is.”

  “But it wasn’t a minute ago.”

  Bridget and Cici looked at her. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. When we first got out of the car all the windows were open. Now that one has a curtain over it. What is that, anyway, the attic? Someone must be in there.”

  Cici thought about that for a minute, then shrugged. “Probably just a ghost.”

  “Maybe it was Maggie,” Bridget suggested. The real estate agent had promised to meet them there to do a walk-through of the house and review some of the general maintenance and operating procedures.

  “Well,” Cici said, rubbing her hands together with forced enthusiasm, “the movers are going to be here at two, and we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “Kitchen first, bathrooms second, bedrooms last,” Bridget said. “Who’s got the broom?”

  “Bathrooms first,” Lindsay said, “I’ve really got to pee.”

  “Then you’d better hope that was Maggie you saw in the window,” Cici said, “because the water isn’t turned on.”

  As they mounted the steps of the house they saw a wicker basket with a bow sitting in front of the door. Bridget oohed and ahhed as she unpacked the basket—a bottle of wine, a geranium plant, a homemade loaf of banana bread wrapped in waxed paper, and a card. Cici read the card out loud.

  “Welcome home, ladies! I’m sorry I couldn’t be here but my daughter went into labor this morning. I’m going to be a grandmother! I will check in with you tomorrow. If you have any problems, you can call my brother-in-law, Farley, at 7834. Good luck! Maggie.”

  Lindsay raised an eyebrow “A four-digit phone number?”

  “This is the country,” Bridget said. “All the exchanges are the same.”

  “Do we know what the exchange is?”

  They looked at each other blankly.

  “Well. Okay.” Cici tucked the card back into the envelope. “How hard can it be to turn on the water? It’s a gravity water system, that much she told us, so there’s no pump to worry about. The shutoff valve has got to be at the cistern.”

  Again the blank looks.

  “It’s a big concrete thing set into the ground,” Cici explained impatiently. “Maggie said it was on the hill behind the barn, remember? Come on, let’s find it.”

  Three-quarters of a sweaty, briar-scratched, bug-bitten hour later, Bridget tripped over an iron handle sticking out of the kudzu-covered ground. The handle was attached to a round concrete lid, and with all three of them putting their weight beh
ind the effort they were able to shift the lid off of a dark, cold hole that smelled like a wet basement. “Ladies,” said Cici, panting as she sat back on her heels, “I give you the cistern.”

  While Lindsay and Bridget scrunched up their faces and averted their eyes in horror, Cici thrust her hand into the black hole and fumbled around for the shutoff valve. “Eureka!” she cried, and in a moment they heard the whoosh and gurgle of water rushing into pipes.

  “We have water!” exclaimed Lindsay.

  “We did it!” cried Bridget. “I feel like a regular pioneer!”

  “Well, it might not be as showy as making fire,” admitted Cici, unable to restrain her pride in the accomplishment, “but damn good for a bunch of amateurs. Come on, let’s get the lid back on.”

  They wrestled the cistern cover back into place and hurried back to the house. With a flourish, Cici produced the big skeleton key and opened the door.

  “Oh . . . my,” Bridget said, and they moved slowly inside.

  Somehow they had forgotten how neglected the interior was. The windows were foggy with dust, the floors dull. There was a huge spiderweb cloaking the entire bay window, and the winter winds had blown a fine coat of gritty ash from the fireplace over everything. Hundreds of thousands of ladybug shells littered the floors and were piled in the corners of the windowsills.

  Lindsay blew out a breath. “Well, okay,” she said. “We knew what we were getting into.”

  “Right.” Bridget clapped her hands together decisively. “I’ve got buckets, mops, and three gallons of bleach in the car.”

  “I’ve got brooms, dustcloths, and a vacuum cleaner,” Cici said, turning toward the door.

  “I’ve still got to pee,” Lindsay said.

  “Around the corner on the right.”

  Cici and Bridget started for their cars, but before they even reached the front porch Lindsay called, “Hey! There’s no electricity!”

  Cici tried the switch by the door. “The power company was supposed to be out yesterday.”

  “They’re probably just running behind,” Bridget said. “They’ve had the work order for weeks. They’ll be out today.”

  “Uh, girls . . .” Lindsay came around the corner, looking grim. “No water, either.”

  “Are you sure?” Cici went to the kitchen, which was even darker and dustier than the front room, and turned on the faucet. Not so much as a gurgle. She turned it off again, looking thoughtful.

  Then her face cleared. “Wait! I’ll bet there’s a whole-house shutoff valve in the cellar. Of course there is. Let me get a flashlight from the car.”

  Bridget stood guard at the cellar door as Cici crept down the stairs, her flashlight beam bouncing in the darkness. “Be careful!” Bridget called. There were some bumps, a small crash, and Cici swore. “Are you okay?”

  “Wait. I think I found it.”

  Bridget sprang back from the door as the whole house was filled with a terrible rattling, thumping noise. Lindsay came around the corner, her hands over her ears. “Is it supposed to do that?” She had to shout to be heard.

  “It’s just air in the pipes,” Cici said, brushing cobwebs out of her hair as she came up from the cellar. Already the noise was beginning to subside. “But that should do it. Let’s check the faucet.”

  They pushed through the swinging door of the kitchen to the sound of an ominous rumbling that seemed to be coming from the sink. Without another warning, the faucet suddenly exploded into the air. Metal handles, screws, and fixtures flew in four different directions. Bridget screamed. All of them ducked. A geyser of water erupted into the air, splashing off the ceiling and running like a river across the brick floor.

  Their horrified paralysis lasted only a moment, and then they rushed forward, slipping and splashing, to the sink. Bridget and Lindsay flung themselves on the geyser, trying to stem the flow with their hands. Cici dropped to the floor and flung open the cabinet beneath the sink, pulling herself underneath. She found the cutoff valve, wrenched it with both hands, and slowly, inevitably the fountain dropped from the ceiling, to a three foot pulse, to a gurgle, and then a drip. Cici crawled out from under the sink, and pulled herself to her feet.

  The three women looked at each other, gasping. Their hair hung in dripping strands around their faces, their shirts were soaked through, and they were standing in water that covered their shoes. When she was able, Cici said, “Pressure valve.”

  Lindsay said, “I think I wet my pants.”

  Bridget just looked at her, a shell-shocked expression on her face. “How can you tell?”

  And they went in search of towels.

  Fortunately, the kitchen explosion seemed to have relieved the pressure in the pipes, and water was flowing freely to all other outlets—including the water heater, where it immediately flowed out again, creating another lake in the laundry room to match the one in the kitchen. Cici turned off the valve to the water heater and added “water heater” to the grocery list that Bridget had tacked up on the pantry wall. They spent the next four hours mopping, scrubbing, disinfecting, and polishing. They swept up twelve dustpans filled with ladybugs and two trash bags of leaves. They washed and wiped and polished the windows until they glittered with sparks of sunlight. Two o’clock came and went, but the movers did not. They scrubbed toilets and bleached grout. They ate banana bread with peanut butter from Lindsay’s stash. They wore out two mops on the floors, and poured out twelve buckets of muddy water. No power company truck pulled into the driveway.

  At six o’clock, Cici trudged out onto the porch with Maggie’s gift bottle of wine in one hand and a cordless drill in the other. She sank to the top step, shoulders slumped, the wine bottle dangling between her knees, too tired to move another inch. After a time, she became aware that Lindsay had come out to sit beside her.

  Lindsay’s ponytail was straggling, her cheek was smudged, her shirt torn. There was a Band-Aid on her index finger, and she was rubbing a blister on her thumb. She said, “Bridget found rat poop behind the stove.”

  With a deliberate effort, Cici said, “I . . . don’t . . . care.” She lifted her arm and brushed away a ladybug that was crawling on Lindsay’s collar, and let it drop heavily again.

  A silence, while they both seemed to gather their strength for further conversation. Lindsay said, “I guess we’ll be going back to the Holiday Inn tonight.”

  “I guess.”

  The mere thought of getting back into a car, any car, and driving an hour for a room seemed almost to defeat them both.

  In a moment, Lindsay nodded toward the drill that Cici held motionless in one hand. “What’s that for?” Her voice was dull and flat, as though exhaustion had made the words themselves heavy.

  With an effort, Cici roused herself. “No corkscrew.”

  Cici placed the bottle of wine on the step between her feet, tore off the foil cover, and inserted the drill bit into the cork. Lindsay watched without comment as she drilled halfway through the cork, braced the bottle between her feet, pulled upward with both hands on the drill, and popped the cork free.

  “You’re a regular little MacGyver, aren’t you?”

  Cici looked at the bottle for a moment. “No glasses,” she said.

  Lindsay held out her hand. Cici passed the wine bottle to her. Lindsay brought the bottle to her lips, drank, and passed it back to Cici. Cici did the same.

  “I don’t understand,” Lindsay said after a time, “how the moving company can lose an entire thirty-five foot van complete with the personal possessions of three separate households.”

  Cici seemed to ruminate on that for a while. “It’s not exactly lost,” she said. “It’s just not here.”

  Lindsay retrieved the bottle. “I finally got hold of the power company on my cell,” she said. “They have no record of our work order. They said it would be a couple of weeks.”

  Cici drank again, and returned the bottle.

  “Also called the phone company. Guess what we don’t have?”

&nbs
p; “Phone service?”

  “Broadband Internet. Apparently it’s not available in this area. Neither is cable television.”

  “Jesus. Where are we? The Yukon?”

  “Nah. In The Yukon you can get satellite Internet.”

  They drank in silence for a while. The birds fluttered, chirped, and scolded raucously from the branches of a poplar tree that hung over the porch, and they could hear Bridget still bustling around inside through the open door. But otherwise the quietness was so intense it was almost a texture—as light as silk, as soft as velvet. After a while they felt it seep into them—the smell of grass, the rolling valley, the absolute stillness.

  “If silence was a color,” Lindsay said softly, “it would be green.”

  Cici leaned in and bumped her friend affectionately with one shoulder. “Stop talking like a dumb artist.”

  Lindsay blew out a slow, tired breath. “Did we make a mistake?”

  Cici didn’t answer for a time. She looked at the afternoon sun glinting on the dogwoods on a hillside, at the brilliant blanket of green that covered the distant mountains. And she looked at the tangle of overgrown vines in the orchard, the rotting tree limbs that littered the yard, the tumbled-down barn. She said, “I don’t think we can fix this place up in a year.”

  “I don’t think we can even clean it in a year.”

  “On the other hand . . .” Cici retrieved the bottle, and drank. “With no cable and no Internet, what else have we got to do?”

  Lindsay sat up a little straighter, looking around. “Do you smell that?”

  Cici tested the air, her brow wrinkling. “It smells like—”

  “Dinner,” called Bridget cheerfully. She pushed through the screen door carrying a big footed tray. “Canned tomato soup with fresh herbs, wild dandelion salad with strawberry vinaigrette, pan bread, and strawberry cobbler!”

  The other two hurried to help her with the tray. “What in the world?”

  “But how—”

  “The stove is gas,” she replied, beaming. “The herb garden is thriving, and that sunny hill behind the house is just covered in strawberries. I picked the ones that were ripe, and there was a enough for the salad and a cobbler!”