A Year on Ladybug Farm #1

by Donna Ball

  “That’d be real sweet, honey.” She finished off her second muffin and said, “Now those were just delicious. Where did you get the pecans?”

  When Bridget confessed she bought them, Maggie gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “You won’t be doing that anymore! See all those trees up and down your driveway? Pecan trees! And all behind the house here are hickory and black walnut. Some people make a hickory nut cake, but give me black walnut any day—as long as you can keep the squirrels away from them! Be careful not to get the juice on your hands, though. You’ll never get the stain out. That was what the Indians used to dye their clothes.”

  She cocked her head and said, “Well, that sounds like Farley coming down off the ladder. He’ll be wanting to get back.” She pushed back her chair and stood while Cici hurried to get a ten dollar bill for Farley.

  Bridget and Lindsay walked with her around the porch to the front of the house. “You ladies certainly do have your work cut out for you,” Maggie said, stopping to gaze back appreciatively as she descended the steps. “But my, this is a marvelous old place, isn’t it?”

  They agreed that it was. Then Lindsay said, “We sure could use some help with the yard work. I don’t suppose you know a high school boy looking to pick up a little extra cash.”

  “No, I can’t say that I do. But I’ll ask around for you.”

  Farley was already in the car, and Cici was squinting up at the roof, admiring the job he’d done.

  “Oh by the way, I love your sign,” Maggie called as she reached the car. “It’s a little crooked, though. I’ll have Farley fix it for you when we go by.” She opened the driver’s door. “Ladybug Farm. Is that the cutest thing? Welcome home!”

  They waved as she drove away, and then turned back to gaze up at the big old mansion. “Home,” repeated Lindsay. “Wow.”

  And Bridget added, with a note of wonder, “Imagine that.”

  Cici was silent for a moment, nodding thoughtfully, and then she grinned. “I think I can get used to it,” she decided.

  Linking arms, they mounted the steps and went inside.

  While Bridget spent the morning scouring and rearranging the pantry, Cici drove into town for her first visit to the lumber store, and Lindsay decided to tackle the wallpaper in her bedroom. She had spent the winter flipping through decorating magazines and browsing the home improvement stores, and had arrived at Ladybug Farm armed with wallpaper stripper, glazing medium, two gallons of primer and two of base coat, and two painstakingly chosen shades of paint: Misty Arbor and Apple Blossom. To the untrained eye, the two colors looked very much the same, but Lindsay knew better. When she was finished the room would have the feel of a woodland bower, dappled with misty morning sun.

  She moved the furniture to the center of the room and covered it with tarps, then taped down first a layer of plastic, followed by brown paper over the hardwood floors. With the help of a PaperTiger and a spray bottle of adhesive remover, the cabbage rose wallpaper came off strip by strip, and with surprisingly little resistance.

  She was thrilled until she realized that underneath the wallpaper was another layer of paper. Newsprint had been used to even out the walls before applying the wallpaper, and it appeared to have been applied with permanent glue. In some places they had apparently run out of newsprint and had used sheets of newspaper—even writing paper—instead.

  For a while she was intrigued by the scraps of printing she could make out: July 1921 Chicken House Destroyed by Fire; December 1928, New Fire Engine Arrives, and advertisements for Carter’s Pills and Borax, 20 cents. She even tried to save a few pieces intact, thinking they would make a nice collage or framed artwork for one of the downstairs rooms. But by lunchtime she was sticky with glue and her clothes were splotched with the water she was using to soften the papers, the room was littered with trash, and only half a wall was finished. It was clear to see that the project was not going to be as simple as she had assumed.

  When Cici returned from town with a dozen two-by-fours sticking out of the back hatch window of the SUV, Lindsay was relieved to take a break to help her carry them upstairs. “I thought I’d start framing out the closets in that hall between your room and Bridget’s,” Cici explained, walking backward up the stairs with the bundled ends of a stack of two-by-fours in her gloved hands. “The lumber store said they could deliver the rest of the materials this afternoon.”

  “Great,” said Lindsay. “I can unpack my suitcases. Of course, now I’ll be lucky if I can even find them.”

  Cici glanced into Lindsay’s room as they passed. “What a mess.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  They placed the lumber in the connecting hall between the two rooms, and Cici wandered into Lindsay’s room to take a look at her progress. “You’ve got your work cut out for you,” she said, kicking away wallpaper scraps as she entered the room. “That underlayment looks like it’s been put on with mucilage.”

  “What is that?”

  “That’s the glue they used to make from—well, from horses. It’s almost impossible to dissolve.”

  Lindsay grimaced. “Terrific.”

  “You could repaper it.”

  “I don’t want wallpaper. I wanted my own faux finish.”

  “Wow, look at that.” Cici bent down to pick up a scrap of paper. “They used old newspapers.”

  “Other things, too. I found some store receipts from 1912.”

  Cici laughed. “That’s great. I always wanted to paper my walls with my bills.” She bent down again and picked up another paper.

  “What’s this? It didn’t come off the wall did it?”

  Lindsay turned to examine the paper she held. It was a little battered, torn at the corners, and crisp with age, but completely readable. “Oh my goodness,” Lindsay said, taking it slowly from Cici. “Do you know what this is? It’s a landscape map. A complete layout of the gardens!”

  “How funny,” Cici said. “Only this morning you were saying you wished you had one.”

  Lindsay gave her a startled look. “You’re right,” she said, “I did.”

  “Look here.” Cici pointed on the map, “The paths were flagstone. I bet if we dug down a little they would still be there. And there was a wall around the whole rose garden. What is that—river rock?”

  “There’s a stream at the edge of the property,” Lindsay said. “I didn’t know that, did you? I’ll bet that’s where they got the rocks.”

  “Come on,” Cici said eagerly, “let’s go check it out.”

  “Beats scraping wallpaper,” Lindsay agreed. “Let’s go!”

  The streambed was in fact a virtually endless source of the kind of large, flat polished stones that, when arranged into a low wall, would transform the rose garden into a work of art. Lindsay remembered seeing an old wheelbarrow in the potting shed, and couldn’t wait to start hauling rocks to the garden. Cici found a hoe and started chopping away at the weeds and years of earth until she uncovered, just as she had predicted, the first flagstones of the original garden path. By the time they put away their tools for the day they were streaked with sweat and dirt, and they knew their muscles would ache in the morning. But an entire section of flagstone path had been uncovered, and one layer of shiny dark river stones outlined the rose garden.

  “It’s never ending,” Lindsay said, bringing a glass of wine to join Cici on the front steps that evening. She groaned a little as she sat down on the top step beside her. “The list of projects just keeps growing and growing.”

  “Yeah,” Cici agreed, smiling. “It’s hard to know what to do first.”

  They wore jeans and sweaters against the chill of a spring evening, and Lindsay carried a lightweight knit throw over her arm. She spread it over her knees and Cici’s, and leaned back on one palm as she sipped her wine, admiring the glitter of the single evening star against a purple sky, and the chittering and trilling of the birds in the background.

  “It was fun, though,” she said in a moment, contentedly. “Lik
e an archaeological dig. And then to see the garden start to take shape like it used to be.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll move the statue.”

  “Meanwhile I’m sleeping in a bedroom with half a wall covered in newspaper.”

  “I don’t know about you,” Cici said, “but I’ve slept in worse.”

  “Like I said, it’s hard to know where to start.”

  The screen door squeaked open softly behind them as Bridget came out. She wore a floor-length terry robe and had her hair wrapped in a towel. In addition to her own glass of wine, she carried a platter of chocolate chip cookies. “If you don’t mind a suggestion,” she said, “a new water heater would be first on my list.”

  They loved the deep, claw-foot tubs. Unfortunately, they required so much hot water that only one of them could take a bath per evening. The other two had to be content with a lukewarm spritzing from the shower attachment. A new, higher capacity water heater was the only solution.

  “I know,” Cici said with a sigh. “But we’re going to have to go to Charlottesville to get it and . . . I just don’t want to leave, you know?”

  The other two murmured agreement as Bridget joined them on the steps, setting the cookie platter between them. Leaving this oasis of timelessness and peace for anything that resembled a city seemed to them all as reckless as trying to breathe water.

  Bridget tugged a corner of the throw over her knees, and picked up a cookie. “I called the nursing home, by the way, about Ida Mae Simpson. She’s not there anymore.”

  Lindsay helped herself to a cookie and passed the platter to Cici. “Oh? Where did she go?”

  Bridget gave her a patient look. “Where does one usually go from a nursing home?”

  “Oh. That’s too bad.”

  “Well, I guess she was pretty old.”

  They sat quietly for a moment, munching cookies, sipping wine, and listening to the rise and fall of crickets’ breath as the indigo twilight deepened to a smoky gray. The cool air, such a delicious contrast to the warmth of the afternoon, carried the promise of dew. Their flesh prickled with cold, but they did not consider going inside.

  “What do you miss the most?” Bridget said softly.

  Lindsay said, “I don’t know. It’s funny, but I kind of miss school. The kids, you know. What about you?”

  “The Internet, maybe. And good coffee ice cream.”

  “Eaten right out of the carton,” Lindsay agreed.

  Bridget turned to Cici. “What about you, Cici? HGTV? The Sherwin-Williams store? What do you miss the most?”

  Cici leaned back on one palm, gazing out over the darkening mountains, and she smiled, lifting her glass. “Not a damn thing,” she said.

  Lindsay drew in a deep breath of night air. “Yeah,” she agreed softly, “me either.”

  Bridget said, “Who needs coffee ice cream?”

  They touched glasses, and drank to wanting nothing.

  8

  In Which Bridget Gets into a Jam

  For Cici, there was little more beautiful than the way the early morning light stretched across the kitchen. It had a rosiness that suffused the ancient bricks and brought out shades of gold and cerulean that were embedded in the mud from whence they came. Yet there was a mistiness to the light, a softness that combined with the sweet, damp air of early summer and reminded her of just how many sunrises this kitchen had seen, just how untouched it had remained. To walk into this kitchen, to see the way the light graced the soft blurred patterns of the Delft tile and the weathered soapstone and the worn brick floor, made her feel ageless.

  On this particular morning, Cici came into the kitchen in her pajamas and robe, stretching sore muscles and combing back her hair with her fingers, to find it filled with strawberries. There were bowls piled high with them on the island. A wicker basket overflowed with them on the counter, surrounded by half a dozen tin pails and an enormous galvanized tub, all filled with strawberries. The aroma swelled through the kitchen and seeped out into the corridor: strawberry, strawberry, strawberry. When Cici licked her lips she could taste them.

  Cici said, “Let me guess what’s for breakfast. Strawberry blintzes.”

  “With strawberry compote, strawberries and cereal, and strawberry muffins for dessert,” added Lindsay, popping one in her mouth as she carried a bowl of freshly hulled strawberries to the stove. “Apparently, it’s strawberry season.”

  Bridget was at the sink, washing a sieve full of strawberries. “These were going to go bad if I didn’t do something with them. I just couldn’t stand to let them rot. So I’m making jam!” She shook the water off the strawberries in the sieve, poured them into an empty bowl, and handed them to Cici. “Help me hull these.”

  Cici took the bowl, flicked a ladybug off the rim, and went to pour herself a cup of coffee. “There are enough strawberries here to make jam for the whole state.”

  “Everything grows so well here,” Bridget replied. “I think it’s the ladybugs.”

  Lindsay asked, eating another strawberry, “Do you know how to make jam?”

  “There’s nothing to it. It’s just fruit and sugar.”

  Cici poured herself a bowl of cold cereal and sliced strawberries over it. Every other slice went into her mouth. They had been enjoying the strawberries for weeks as they ripened, but still every taste was a surprise. Like most consumers in the United States, they had forgotten what strawberries were supposed to taste like. They knew the smell, and the color, but the taste of the ordinary supermarket strawberry out of the carton was like cardboard. The strawberries of Ladybug Farm were so sweet they were a confection unto themselves; they practically melted on the tongue and infused the senses with the taste of sunshine, the essence of strawberry.

  “Well, all I can say is that if you can bottle this taste, you’ve got yourself a gold mine.” Cici poured milk over her cereal, then dipped a strawberry into the milk and ate it with her fingers.

  Bridget turned from the sink with a happy, speculative look on her face. “Wouldn’t that be something? To bring back the Blackwell Farms jams?”

  “Well, I don’t know if we’re ready for a national ad campaign,” Lindsay said, “but it would be a shame to let all this fruit go to waste. Do you have a big enough pot, Bridget?”

  Bridget hauled out a stockpot, two Dutch ovens, and a crockpot, and they spent the next hour washing, hulling, and slicing strawberries. Bridget filled the pots, covered the fruit with sugar, and the entire house began to fill with the aroma of strawberries as the fruit came to a simmer.

  “Now,” declared Bridget, giving the countertop a final swipe with the sponge, “all we have to do is let the fruit cook down and thicken, and we have jam.”

  Cici said, “Shouldn’t we be washing the jars?”

  Bridget’s face, for a moment, displayed absolutely no expression. Then she said, “Get dressed. We’re going to town.”

  The little town of Blue Valley snuggled up against the base of a hillside that was awash in deep violet thrift, which made one wonder whether the town had been named because of the flowers, or whether the thrift had been planted to honor the town. It was the latter, in fact. The Mountain Gardenias Gardening Club had planted the thrift as part of the Centennial Celebration ten years earlier and the result had astonished even the originators. The bristly blue-flowered plant had dug in its roots and spread up and down the back side of Main Street, so that the impression, as one first came over the hill into town, was of a French watercolor.

  The town was laid out in a T shape, with a single stoplight where one could turn right off of Main Street and be on Harrison Street, and left off of Main to be on Riker Street. On Main and Harrison, there was a white clapboard Methodist church with a steeple and a bell. Across the intersection on Main and Riker was an identical Baptist church. On Sunday mornings the cacophonous pealing of the two bells woke everyone within a five-mile radius.

  Over the years, locals had begun referring to Harrison Street as “the Methodist side” and Riker Street
as “the Baptist side.” The library, for example, was on the Methodist side. The quilt and notions shop was on the Baptist side. Jason’s Grocery was on the Methodist side, and Henry’s Bait and Tackle on the Baptist. Main Street was home to Harrison’s Fine Furniture, which took up two of the four blocks, Dana’s Family Clothing, Johnson’s Pharmacy, the Dollar Store, and Family Hardware and Sundries, established 1901.

  Sundries was one of those ambiguous words that did not begin to describe the extent and variety of Family Hardware—the vast majority of which was not hardware at all. The sidewalk in front of the store was crowded with a display of wooden rocking chairs, porch swings, and hand-carved birdhouses. Inside, the wood floors were dark with age and barely visible amidst the shelves and stacks of merchandise that overflowed every available space. There were galvanized washtubs and vacuum cleaners, new and refurbished, alongside homemade soaps and hand-dipped candles, which were haphazardly displayed next to lantern globes and cotton wicks. There were stacks of cotton dish towels, electric skillets, rabbit hutches, wire traps, rodent bait, and fertilizer. Portable television sets were arranged on a shelf next to wheelbarrow tires. There were decorative crock butter churns, hand-painted flower pots, and plumbing supplies, in addition to light switches, junction boxes, and R-16 cable. There were chain saws and snowshoes, camping supplies, and antique dolls displayed in a glass case. There were music boxes, Burt’s Bees shampoos and hand lotions, and yes, glass canning jars.

  “Look at this,” Lindsay exclaimed softly from behind a stack of hand-stitched quilts.

  Cici, dragging herself away from the study of a rather nice original oil painting of sheep in a pasture, murmured, “It’s Aladdin’s cave.”

  Bridget came around a corner laden with gardening gloves, lip balm, bath salts, and a bizarre-looking white wicker contraption that was shaped like a hoop with a platform in the center and a chain at the top.

  “What in the world?” queried Cici.