A Year on Ladybug Farm #1

by Donna Ball

“And to start restoring the garden walkway and build most of a rock wall,” Bridget pointed out, “and refinish the stairs and paint all the trim and repair the molding and the doorknobs and the roof and the siding and the fence. Besides, it’s a gorgeous porch.”

  “And a fabulous bedroom,” added Cici. “Of course, we still have to refinish all the floors in the living room. And all the windows in the sunroom are rotted out. I think I can make a deal with one of the guys at the lumber store to buy some used ones cheap, but it’s going to take time to replace them all.”

  “We should talk to someone about repairing the barn roof before winter.”

  “I can do that,” Cici said. “All it will take is a piece of plywood.”

  Lindsay gave her a reproachful look. “You don’t have to do everything, Cici.”

  Cici shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

  Bridget smiled. “Remember all the plans we had when we decided to buy this place?”

  “You were going to bring back the Blackwell Farms jams and restore the vineyard,” Lindsay said. “Not to mention open a restaurant.”

  “And you were going to open an art studio and bring in students from around the country.”

  “And if it hadn’t been for one little rattlesnake . . .”

  “Besides,” said Bridget, “it wasn’t exactly a restaurant I wanted to open. I just wanted to cook. And who knew there would be sheep to take care of?”

  “I guess it’s all been a little bit more than any of us expected,” Cici said. “But still, it’s only been six months.”

  “Seems like longer,” Lindsay sighed.

  “Seems like only yesterday,” Bridget said.

  The very faintest trace of a frown creased Bridget’s brow as she studied her wineglass. “Can I ask you both something? Seriously?”

  They looked at her.

  “If it hadn’t been for me,” Bridget said, “I mean, losing Jim and all, and being at loose ends the way I was . . . would you ever have done this?”

  Lindsay laughed. “Are you kidding? Not in a million years. I wouldn’t even have thought about it!”

  And Cici agreed. “How could we have done it without you, Bridge? It never would have crossed my mind.” Then she looked at her, a little puzzled. “Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing.” Bridget’s smile seemed a little strained. “It’s silly. Just some stupid thing Kevin said.”

  Lindsay said thoughtfully, “You know what it’s like? The end of a vacation. Everything was so much fun when we started out. Now it’s . . . well, a lot of responsibility.”

  They nodded agreement, and no one had anything to say for a while.

  Then Bridget said softy, “It’s so quiet out here.”

  They listened for a moment, trying to decide what was missing. And then they knew. It was the sound of birdsong.

  Lindsay shivered and slipped her arms into the sleeves of a cotton sweater she had tossed about her shoulders. “It’s cool tonight.”

  “Summer’s almost over,” observed Cici.

  “I hear hickory makes good firewood,” Lindsay said.

  Cici gave a small, disbelieving shake of her head. “Firewood. Where did the time go? I can’t even start to think about everything we have to get done before winter.”

  Bridget stood. “I’m cold, too. I think I’ll go inside.”

  And then she stopped. “Oh, my.” Her tone was reverent. “Would you look at that sunset?”

  Lindsay stood, too, and then Cici. “Wow,” she said softly. “I never noticed before.”

  “Me, either.”

  “I guess,” said Bridget reluctantly, after a moment, “the tree was in the way.”

  They stood together, their faces painted with the pink glow of the fading sun, and watched the rich pastel colors streak across the sky until the day was done.

  Autumn

  Harvest

  14

  In Which Preservation Is Paramount

  On the morning that Lindsay discovered she was fat, Bridget found a handful of canning jar labels tucked inside Emily Blackwell’s recipe book, and Cici discovered a bushel basket of persimmons on the front steps.

  At first they had been deeply touched by the gifts from the gardens of their well-meaning neighbors. Soon after the disaster with the lawn mower, Sam brought over a large brown grocery sack filled with green beans—from his wife, he said, who had more than she could put up. They thanked him profusely, but assured him it wasn’t his fault their garden had been destroyed and that it wasn’t necessary to bring them produce.

  But the next afternoon, Farley brought over a basket of tomatoes and three dozen bell peppers, and Maggie sent an additional dozen eggplants. Someone from church asked if they had any corn, and when Cici answered in the negative, transferred two bushels of fresh-picked corn from the back of his truck to the back of her SUV. Their ruined garden, they quickly came to realize, had become the excuse for every woman in the county who couldn’t face canning another tomato or pickling another cucumber to dispose of the excess bounty from their own gardens—and to feel good about herself while she did it.

  They made zucchini bread, zucchini casserole, fried, sauteed, and roasted zucchini. They made squash soup, tomato soup, onion soup, and enough marinara sauce to open an Italian restaurant. They chopped pears for chutney and simmered them into a sweet, thick sauce and ate them whole, with juices dripping down their wrists and chins, over the sink. Everything else was put on hold for a season that wouldn’t wait, and the abundance of nature’s harvest took over their lives.

  They bought a second freezer and installed it in the cellar. They shaved corn off the cob and packed it into plastic pint containers, blanched green beans, lima beans, okra, and field peas and did the same. And of course they couldn’t ignore the bounty of their own fruit trees and bushes when they began to produce. Bridget added twenty-seven glistening jars of blackberry jam to the strawberry coulis in the pantry, and at least as many jars of cherry jelly, grape jelly, and applesauce. They wondered out loud just how long gardens could possibly continue to produce in this region, anyway.

  Bridget glanced up from puzzling over the canning jar labels and stifled a groan as Cici set the basket of fruit on the counter between an overflowing basket of corn and a tall paper sack of unshelled butter beans, nudging aside two rows of fat, ripe tomatoes to make room.

  “What is it?” Bridget asked.

  “Persimmons, according to the note. The Baptist preacher’s wife thought we could use them. I don’t even know what a persimmon is.”

  Bridget’s eyes went wide. “That’s weird.”

  Cici gave a grunt of laughter as she edged the coffeepot out from between a tower of red peppers and yet another basket filled with corn. “Maybe to you. I gave up being surprised by what I find on our front porch about a month ago.”

  “No, I mean, look.” Bridget waved the stack of canning jar labels at her. “I found these in the cookbook.”

  Cici poured a cup of coffee and crossed the room to take the labels. They were made of heavy paper, cut with a decorative edge, and were without the adhesive back of modern jar labels. Each had a colorful, faded border of fruits entwined with vines and flowers, and in the center of each label was written in brush calligraphy “Blackwell Farms Persimmon Jelly.”

  Cici raised an eyebrow as she returned the labels. “Cool. Now we know what you do with a persimmon.”

  “These weren’t in this book yesterday,” Bridget insisted. “I know they weren’t because—”

  “Get away from me with your muffins, your coffee cakes, and your French toast topped with jam.” Lindsay came through the door with her face averted and her two index fingers crossed before her as though to ward off evil. “One pair of jeans, I can believe the dryer shrunk. Two, maybe. But three? I don’t think so.”

  She marched straight to the refrigerator, opened it, and peered in. “Isn’t there any fruit?”

  “How about a persimmon?” suggested Cici.

  “I don�
��t even know what a persimmon is.”

  “Something else we have to peel, cook, and preserve,” said Cici.

  “Great. That’s how my jeans got so tight in the first place.” Lindsay closed the refrigerator door and opened a cabinet. “Isn’t there anything to eat?”

  Both Bridget’s and Cici’s eyes traced the cornucopia of produce the kitchen had become—tomatoes on every surface, baskets and bags spilling over with green and yellow vegetables, unshucked corn stacked on the counters and floor—but wisely said nothing. Lindsay closed the cabinet door resolutely.

  “I’m going for a run,” she said. “That’s the whole problem, you know. We’re just not active enough.”

  Cici and Bridget waited until the door had slammed behind her before they let the giggles take over.

  Cici glanced again at the labels as she sat beside Bridget at the island. “Not wanting to seem ungrateful or anything, but the last thing we need is more jelly. What we need are labels for vegetable soup.”

  Bridget reluctantly tucked the labels into the back of the cookbook. “You don’t think it’s strange? A basket of persimmons is left on our porch the same morning I find a stack of handmade labels—who knows how old they are—for persimmon jelly?”

  “Right. And I guess you’re going to tell me the ghost of Emily Blackwell left them there.”

  “Well, somebody did.”

  “Soup,” Cici insisted, nudging the cookbook. “Soup.”

  Bridget turned pages in the book, sipping her coffee. “We’ve got eight gallons of soup in the freezer. Tomato, tomato basil, tomato and okra, tomato with carmelized onion and red wine, cream of tomato, tomato chowder. Corn, corn chowder, cream of corn . . .”

  “Okay, I get it. I know we’re going to be glad we have it in the winter, but right now I don’t care if I never see another vegetable.”

  “Wait. Here’s something we haven’t made yet. Brunswick stew.”

  “I love Brunswick stew.” Cici leaned in to peer at the recipe. “Tomatoes, butter beans, onions, corn . . . this is perfect! We can use all these vegetables in one big stew!”

  Bridget wrinkled her nose and she dragged her finger down the list of ingredients. “Venison . . .”

  “Use beef,” suggested Cici.

  “Duck . . .”

  “Chicken.”

  “Hog jowls?”

  “Pork loin.”

  “It says here to slow roast the meat on a spit over an open fire.”

  Now it was Cici’s turn to wrinkle her nose. “When was that thing written anyway? During the American Revolution?”

  Bridget looked up from the book. “Wait. We’ve got Lindsay’s propane grill stored in the barn. We haven’t used it all summer.”

  “We’ve been too busy peeling vegetables.”

  “That’s an open flame, isn’t it?”

  “It sure is,” agreed Cici. “And while we’re slow roasting the meat, why don’t we grill some of those red peppers that are about to go bad?”

  Bridget grinned. “Do you know how much fire-roasted red peppers go for in the supermarket?”

  “This is fantastic.” Cici rubbed her hands together, gaining enthusiasm for the project. “We can get rid of every last vegetable in this kitchen today! Do you know how to can fire-roasted red peppers?”

  Bridget shrugged. “How hard can it be?”

  Cici, remembering the strawberries, said, “Maybe we’ll freeze them.”

  A dreamy, serene expression spread across Bridget’s face as she looked around the kitchen. “We could do it. We could really clear out everything in this kitchen today.”

  “Except the persimmons,” Cici pointed out.

  Bridget’s brow knotted faintly as she thought again about the labels. “I still think it’s weird.”

  Cici finished her coffee. “I’m going to get the grill out.”

  “We’ll have to go into town to buy the meat.”

  “And freezer containers. Don’t forget freezer containers.”

  “Of course we can’t do anything until we shell all these butter beans, husk the corn, and peel the tomatoes.”

  The two of them stared at each other, momentarily defeated. There was a knock on the back door.

  The boy Noah stood there, the perpetual cigarette dangling from his lips, wearing filthy jeans and a faded blue T-shirt with a dragon on it. The temperature hoverered around fifty degrees, and there was gooseflesh on his bare arms. “Gettin’ ready to start splitting your wood,” he said. “Where you want it stacked?”

  Bridget didn’t hesitate. She snatched the cigarette from his lips and tossed it over the rail, then grabbed his arm and pulled him inside. “Do you know how to shell butter beans?” she demanded.

  When she lived in the suburbs, Lindsay ran two miles every day. Well, maybe not every day, but most days. Some days. The problem with running in the country was that there was no place to run to.

  She started jogging around the outside of the pasture fence when the crazed border collie came out of nowhere and charged her. She groped for a stick with which to ward him off, but an apparent muscle twitch from one of the peacefully grazing sheep in the meadow caught his attention at the last moment and he veered off, leapt the fence, and charged the sheep instead. Lindsay moved carefully away from the fence and into the woods.

  There was a trail that followed the stream, and she ran along it for about a hundred yards until she turned her ankle on a stone and almost fell. No harm done though. By that time she was breathing hard and her calves ached, and she was starting to understand why people didn’t run in the country. Aside from the innate hazards, there was simply too much to see. And when you ran, you missed it all.

  Although it was too early in the season for the foliage to have officially reached its peak fall color, the woods were awash in shades of delicate yellow, sherbert orange, and pale maroon. Interspersed with the fading green of a late summer’s memory, the delicate turning of the colors of the leaves made walking down the wooded path feel like being immersed in a watercolor painting. The air tasted cool and damp, and mist clung to the multicolored ground beneath her running shoes. Lindsay shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her velour jogging jacket and slowed her stride, taking it all in.

  Aside from the days spent digging up stones from the streambed, none of them had had the time over the summer to explore the property, and Lindsay had never been this deep into the woods before. The path meandered away from the stream, sometimes overgrown by weeds or blocked by fallen trees, and eventually opened onto a small, misty glade. Lindsay caught her breath.

  There it was. The folly.

  It hardly looked like the gingerbread house Sonya Maxwell had described. There was a round turretlike structure topped with rusted tin on one side, attached to an octagonal-shaped main room with a multipaneled, similarly rusted-out tin roof. There were three windows in each wall—although the glass was missing now—making the whole more of a gazebo than a house. The green paint that Sonya had described was completely gone now, leaving nothing but bare gray wood, and the delicate scrollwork trim was either hanging from the eaves by a single nail or rotting on the ground.

  Lindsay picked her way through the briars and weeds that surrounded the structure, her breath suspended in awe as she imaged the charm this place must have held for another generation. She understood the reason for the path now, and imagined a horse-drawn wagon, filled with picnic baskets and revelers, traversing it. Or a woman in high-button boots and a bustle gown, strolling down the path with a volume of poetry under her arm, bound for an afternoon of solitary reading in this enchanted place, with nothing but the rustle of the grasses and the chirping of the birds for company.

  What was it Sonya had said? That a folly was a rich man’s extravagance, a building with no practical purpose whatsoever? If that was the case, this was not a folly, because it had obviously served a very important purpose in the lives of the people who had lived here a hundred years ago, and already Lindsay was envisioning h
ow it might be brought back to life.

  There was a circular porch with some missing and rotting boards, and Lindsay climbed up on it carefully. The sagging door still had a few shards of glass intact in one of its six panes, and Lindsay imaged how charming it must have been in its prime. She used her shoulder to assist the stiff hinges and pushed inside.

  Dusty light filtered in from the windows surrounding the circular room. There was a sweet little marble fireplace with carved cherubs on either side, now black with smoke and age. There was a sprinkling of dried leaves on the stained marble floor, but the wind had swept most of them into a corner. Against one wall was an old settee, once upholstered in what appeared to be wine brocade that the rats and squirrels had made short work of long ago. There was a wrought iron table with peeling white paint, and an oddly mismatched cane-seated chair. And in another corner was a dingy rumpled sleeping bag, and an upturned crate upon which were arranged several objects. Curious, Lindsay drew closer.

  The crate, turned on its side, formed three shelves. The top shelf held a razor, a six-pack of Coke from which one can was missing, two Snickers bars, and a bag of freeze-dried beef jerky. On the next shelf was a plastic fork and knife of the kind that came with take-out food, two cans of tuna, a blackened aluminum pan with chunks of charred food melded to the bottom, and a one-liter foam drinking cup with the Burger Shack logo on it. Next to it was a pack of cigarettes and a notebook topped by a curious-looking collection of what looked like flat stones on a leather thong. She almost picked it up until she realized what it was and jerked her hand back. Not stones. Rattles. From a rattlesnake.

  Trying not to grimace, she eased the notebook away from the rattlesnake necklace and flipped it open. It was a sketchbook. Inside were random studies—a stream with rocks, a country road, various views of the mountains, a split rail fence with scrub cedar growing through it that reminded her of the one on the highway that ran alongside their house, a scruffy-looking border collie, a rattlesnake. It was not the quality of the sketches that impressed her—though they definitely showed talent—so much as the fact that they appeared to have been done with nothing more than a #2 pencil.