At Home on Ladybug Farm

by Donna Ball

  Cici blew out a breath that was so forceful it ruffled her bangs. “Lori, we’ve talked about this. You’ve got to think these things through. You can’t just invest in a business idea and hope it works out—especially when it involves as much work as this one.”

  Lindsay pushed open the door and poked her head through. “Ladies,” she said through gritted teeth, and rolled her eyes dramatically back toward the dining room, “could you do this later? We have company, you know.”

  “I’m sorry Aunt Lindsay,” Lori said, and she turned away, busying herself with stroking the tiny bobbing chirping heads in the cardboard box as Lindsay closed the door.

  “I reckon we could clear out a place for them in the conservatory,” Ida Mae grumbled, “at least till you get a coop built. Plenty of daylight in there. I’ll go take up the carpets.”

  Bridget stood and gave Lori’s shoulder a sympathetic stroke before she left the room. “Honey,” she reminded her gently, “the library is our friend.”

  When they were alone, Cici pushed herself to her feet with an air of resolve. “Lori,” she began.

  Lori whirled on her, with her arms flung wide and her eyes flashing. “Okay, Mom, I get it, okay? I’m a total screwup. Nothing I do is right. I don’t know anything about farming or old houses or sheep or chickens. The only chance I’ll ever have at making a life for myself is to go sit in some boring classroom and bat my eyelashes at some boring professor until he gives me a passing grade in some boring subject so I can be some boring lawyer or something. Got it. I’m not as smart as you. I’m not as talented as you. I can’t make things work like you can, and guess what? I’m not perfect like you are! But I don’t see anyone else coming up with any better ideas, do you? At least I’m trying! And if you want to know the truth, I think you’re afraid to even consider the possibility that one—even one—of my ideas might work because then you’d have to admit you were wrong! Well, my new goal in life is to make sure that’s exactly what you have to do. You’re wrong, okay? You’re wrong and I’m going to prove it to you! Maybe not with chickens, maybe not with sheep, but I’ll prove it! You just watch me!”

  Lori’s face was flushed, her breath was quick, and there was a slight catch in her voice with the last words. The room practically rang with the silence that followed her impassioned speech, broken only by the cheeping from the box on the countertop behind her.

  At last Cici spoke. “I was just going to say, we’d better bring the other boxes in from the porch before some stray cat wanders up.”

  It seemed to take a moment for her mother’s mild tone to register, and yet another for the heat to fade from Lori’s gaze. Finally she glanced away, embarrassed. “Oh.”

  Cici crossed the room, opened the back door, and let Lori lead the way to the porch. And she waited until Lori was out of hearing distance to murmur, under her breath, “That’s my girl.”

  “Well.” Cici lowered herself into the rocking chair, next to her friends, and stretched out her legs, grimacing a little as she did so. “One temporary chicken coop-slash-incubator is up and running. One hundred and forty-four tiny little chickens are scattering sawdust all over the sunroom and preparing to keep us up all night with their cheeping. Tomorrow I start building a chicken house. Oh no, don’t thank me. It’s all part of the service here at what is rapidly becoming Loony-bug Farm.”

  Following Ida Mae’s instructions, Cici had built a large, bottomless wooden box out of one-by-sixes to contain the chicks, drilled holes for ventilation, and added a lid. She then had taken apart several small lamps, threaded the sockets through holes in the lid, and added sixty-watt bulbs to keep the chickens at their ideal temperature throughout the night. It had taken most of the afternoon.

  Bridget poured white wine into the glass Cici held out. “Isn’t there some kind of law against building chicken habitats on Easter?”

  “If there’s not, there should be.” Cici leaned back in her rocking chair and groaned. “My daughter hates me.”

  “Which only means you’re doing your job.”

  “Why did I think this would get easier the older Lori got? I’m the worst mother in the world.”

  “Impossible,” Bridget assured her. “I am.”

  “Remember last year how worried I was about her? All I wanted was for her to come home. And now that’s she’s home . . .”

  Bridget stretched her hand across and patted Cici’s arm. “It’s the old be-careful-what-you-wish-for syndrome. When Jim and I were first married, I was sure all my life needed to be complete was a baby. Halfway through fifteen hours of labor I was rethinking that, I can tell you. And, as much as I adore both my kids, I rethought it about once a day for the next twenty-five years.”

  “To top it off, we ruined Easter dinner.” Cici glanced over at Lindsay. “I’m awfully sorry. After the way we behaved, the Hollands probably don’t think we’re qualified to care for ourselves, much less Noah.”

  Lindsay smiled absently, her gaze distant. “Oh, that’s okay. They were good sports about it. And you saw how Prissy was after dinner, wanting to ooh and ahh over the chicks.”

  “You’ve got to admit they’re awfully cute. They remind me of those little stuffed chicks we used to put in the kids’ Easter baskets.”

  “Maybe that’s where I went wrong,” mused Cici. “I should have made sure that stupid Easter bunny only left chocolate chickens.”

  Bridget laughed. “Well, I think Lori and I have come to an agreement—a hundred forty-four chickens are too much. So we agreed to keep two dozen. I called Jonesie and he was really nice about taking the rest of them back. He said he had a feeling he’d be hearing from us.”

  “I’ll just bet he did.” Cici sighed. “Thanks for handling that for me, Bridge. I didn’t dare try to bring that subject up. But why are we keeping two dozen? Couldn’t you have talked her into returning them all?”

  Bridget rocked complacently. “It will be nice to have the eggs,” she said. “And besides, I like chickens.”

  “Sometimes I don’t know which of you is worse,” Cici said, sipping her wine. “In fact, I think you’re probably very bad for each other.” She glanced over at Lindsay, who was gazing out over the mountains, lost in thought. “Everything okay, Linds?”

  “Hmm?” She looked at Cici absently. “Sure, fine. Two dozen. Right. Sounds great.”

  Bridget and Cici exchanged a look. “You seem preoccupied.”

  Lindsay turned her attention to the almost untouched glass of wine in her hand, and took a sip. “Did you know all you have to do to get a permit for a wildlife preserve is to apply to the Department of Natural Resources? I talked to Zeb—you know, Farley’s cousin—after services this morning.”

  Cici’s eyes went wide. “Wildlife preserve? What are you talking about?”

  “I know.” Bridget leaned forward, a note of excitement in her voice. “Bambi!”

  Lindsay nodded. “You have to be approved, of course, but he said he would talk to his boss and didn’t think there would be any problem. Meanwhile he can give us a temporary permit.”

  “Which means we don’t have to go to court!” Bridget exclaimed.

  “Well, we do,” Lindsay clarified, “but we won’t have to pay a fine, and we get to keep Bambi.”

  Cici stared at the two of them. “Sheep, chickens, deer . . . what’s next, skunks and raccoons?” She blew out her breath and gave a short shake of her head. “We already are a wildlife preserve. Might as well make it legal.”

  “Exactly,” Lindsay agreed thoughtfully, sipping her wine. “And all it takes is a piece of paper.”

  “Well, well, well,” Bridget said with satisfaction. “Will you look at us? We start out three fancy ladies from the city and we end up running a wildlife preserve. I love the way that sounds.”

  “Don’t get too carried away,” Cici warned. “It’s just a title. And it’s just one deer. Lindsay, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “So do I,” murmured Lindsay, almost too softly to be heard
.

  “It just goes to show,” Bridget insisted, “you never know where life is going to take you.”

  “Well, I’ll drink to that.” Cici held out her glass.

  “Right,” Lindsay said with a sudden resolve, and she leaned forward to touch her glass to both of theirs. And then she said, “I’m going to adopt Noah.”

  The three of them remained perfectly motionless, glasses touching, eyes locked together, for a long silent moment. Bridget and Cici studied Lindsay’s face, the set of her shoulders, the quiet certainty in her eyes. They listened to what she did not say. They listened, almost, to her thoughts.

  “Okay.”

  “All right then.”

  The three women sat back, sipped their wine, and said nothing more.

  May Flowers

  Where we love is home.

  —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR.

  14

  In Another Time

  Emmy Marie, 1967

  Andrew Jackson Blackwell was forty-five years old, about to be elected District Court judge, and in love with a woman half his age. If it had happened to anyone else, he would have laughed.

  The problem was that he did not think of himself as old. He was still as tall and straight shouldered as when he had worn his army uniform. He had a full head of coal black hair and straight white teeth and when he looked in the mirror he saw a boy of twenty-three, toasting the fine long legs of a honey-haired mademoiselle with mischief in her eyes. As his mother told him all too often, life had been too good to him.

  She did not know his heart was broken, as hers had been, that he had had to leave his brother behind in an unmarked grave in Germany. She did not know that he had loved only once, briefly and passionately, and had watched his beloved’s blood spill between his desperate, rain-soaked fingers onto a cobbled street in France. She did not know that afterward there was a hole inside him, because he worked so hard to cover it up with big plans and glad hands and fine dinners and lots and lots of laughter. And the truth was that until Emmy Marie came along some twenty years later to fill it, even he had almost forgotten the hole existed.

  She was fresh out of William & Mary with a degree in art history, of all the useless things, and she had promised her mother she would call Miss Emily before she left Virginia. Emily Blackwell never forgot one of her “girls,” as she referred to the young soldiers’ wives to whom she had offered a home during the war, and when it turned out one had given birth to a daughter who was named after her, she naturally invited her namesake to come out to the house for a weekend.

  She was a blond-haired bundle of charm in a Pucci-print minidress who threw herself into Emily Blackwell’s arms and hugged her as though she were a long-lost aunt, and then turned the same exuberant affection on Ida Mae, about whom her mother had told so many stories. Andrew noted her arrival, but he was busy in the vineyard that time of year and barely looked at her until dinner that night, when she enchanted him as effortlessly as she did everyone else at the table.

  It was his mother who suggested Emmy might enjoy a tour of the winery, and, although he told himself he was only being the polite host, he found himself enjoying the sound of her laughter on the warm dewy air the next morning, and the faint breeze of her perfume as it mingled with the scent of the vines. He told her how he had fallen in love with the wine country of France during the war, and how its misty valleys and rolling hills had reminded him of home. And how he had wondered why the great wines of the Loire Valley, which was so similar in climate and topography to the Shenandoah Valley, could not be reproduced across the ocean.

  She laughed as he told her how he and his French friend Robert DuPoncier had smuggled vine cuttings out of the country under their shirts and had almost gotten caught twice but had evaded the customs officials by pretending to be suffering with food poisoning. He had actually vomited all over one poor fellow’s shoes. He told her how Robert, who had worked at wine making in every chateau in the valley in hopes of one day creating his own vintage, had believed in his dream and left his own country for the valleys of Virginia to make it come true. They had grafted and coddled those cuttings, brutally pruning and tenderly nursing, cutting away and preserving, until they had a grape that was uniquely their own. He told her of the hopes they had had for each year’s vintage, how some years had been disasters of such proportions that bottles actually exploded in the rack, and how others had produced decent, drinkable wines, and others, as the years went on, were even better until now they were actually beginning to win awards, and Robert, who had given up so much to invest in Andrew’s dream, was so proud that Andrew threatened to bottle their latest vintage under the peacock label.

  He poured her a glass of last year’s red, which had turned out quite fine, and her eyes closed in gentle appreciation as she tasted it. “I can taste Virginia in it,” she said in a moment, and she opened her eyes, smiling at him. “It tastes like home.”

  They took their glasses and sat at the wrought iron table under the shade of an oak, gazing at the mountains, talking with an ease that was rare and refreshing to Andrew. He did not find her as fatuous and boring as he did most young people; in fact when he was with her he forgot her age altogether. She had a composure and a maturity that were beyond her years, and her interests embraced the world. She told him about her childhood in Little Rock, where she had grown up with her mother and her grandparents and cousins of all descriptions, and about college and her ambitions for herself, which were straightforward and filled with modern ideas. She believed a woman could be more than a wife and mother, although certainly she wanted to be both someday. But first she wanted to travel the world, to see the Louvre and the L’Orangerie, and to touch the face of a pyramid and walk the streets of Florence, and sit in St. Mark’s Square and gaze for hours upon the horsemen that crowned the Doge’s Palace. When she spoke her face became rapt, her gaze dreamy, and Andrew was seized suddenly by a longing as intense as any he had ever known. He wanted to be the one to take her to those places, and show her those things. He wanted to see the world anew through her eyes.

  Instead, he did the next best thing, which was to take her there through his eyes, and his memories. While they still sat there together, beneath the oak tree, he took her to the castles of Germany and the cathedrals of France, across the canals of Venice in a gondola against a fiery sunset, through the fine hotels of London. And then he told her of Dominique, Robert’s sister, and how she had died in his arms on a dark cobbled street and had taken a part of his heart with him. By this time the sky was turning pink behind the mountains, and the wine was long gone, and her hand, small and soft and sweet, was covering his. She leaned forward, her eyes filled with distress, and she said softly, “I’m so sorry.”

  He looked at her hand, and he took it and turned it gently, ever so gently, palm up in his. He looked at her face, and he thought, I am going to kiss this exquisite creature.

  It was then that Dominic called to him across the lawn, and as Andrew rose to introduce Emmy to Robert’s son, he wasn’t sure whether he was sorry or relieved.

  After supper he invited Robert and Dominic up to the house, as he often did, but that night the occasion was social, not business. His mother enjoyed the company of the handsome young Dominic, who was apprenticing to take over Robert’s position at the winery when or if Robert decided to retire. Emmy seemed to enjoy speaking French with Robert, and was held rapt by the stories he told. Andrew himself was held rapt by the sound of her voice, the glint of lamplight on her hair, the curve of her wrist when she lifted her glass to sip, and her smile, which seemed to be meant only for him.

  At some point, he wasn’t exactly sure how, the conversation turned to the great tasting rooms of Europe, the lush decor and the muraled walls, and how the Vanderbilts and the Fords and the Rockefellers had decorated their wine cellars similarly, and his mother said, “Well, my dear, I think we must bring someone in to paint a scene for us, don’t you think?”

  Thanks to the determination and busin
ess acumen of Emily Blackwell, the small dairy operation she had started during the war had grown into Blackwell Farms Creamery, purveyor of fine cheeses to restaurants throughout the state, and her kitchen jelly operation now required its own manufacturing plant and shipped Blackwell Farms Fine Jams and Jellies all over the South. But it had taken almost twenty years for her to acknowledge that “Andrew’s little winery,” as she called it, was anything more than a hobby. For Andrew, of course, it was his law practice that was the hobby, and wine making his passion. And it always gave Andrew a small thrill of pride whenever she took an interest in anything having to do with the winery. Commissioning a mural for the tasting room was, for her, a very big step indeed.

  That was when Emmy shyly volunteered that she had done some mural work and would be honored to design something for their tasting room, if they liked. His mother liked that idea immediately and there was a great deal of discussion about the project, and in the process it was agreed that in addition to the winery, she should also paint a mural here in the living room where everyone could see and enjoy it, and that rather than the traditional vineyard scene Emmy should render two views of the scenic meadow, winter and spring, and that the two bookshelf alcoves that flanked the fireplace would be the perfect place for them.

  Andrew did not care what she painted or where she painted it. The project would take weeks. She was staying.

  15

  Changes

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Lindsay said, “of course I haven’t thought it through.” Her voice was high and tight and her hands gripped the steering wheel as though if she relaxed them the car might leave the road of its own accord and sail into the sky. Given her speed and the erratic nature of her driving, that was not, in fact, entirely out of the question. “If I thought about it for even one minute I’d realize how crazy it is.”