A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [12]
“That kitchen,” Bridget said wistfully. “You’d feel like Emeril Lagasse cooking in a kitchen like that.”
“You’d have to hire a team of tractor drivers just to clean up the yard,” Lindsay said.
“High school boys,” insisted Cici.
“But wouldn’t it be something to bring that orchard back to life? And look, right here.” Lindsay hit the Pause button on her keyboard and a photograph of tangled spiky bushes overgrown in grass froze on the screen. “Those are raspberry bushes. And that whole hill behind them is covered in blueberries.”
“Raspberries are $6.99 a pound,” Bridget said. “Wouldn’t it be something just to walk out in the orchard and pick your own?”
“Or open it to the public and let them pick their own—for $4.99 a pound,” Cici said.
Bridget nodded. “Pick-your-own farms can make six figures a year.”
“Where did you hear that?” Lindsay demanded.
“On the Internet.”
“She’s right,” Cici said. “With the organic produce/natural foods craze, small farms are actually becoming profitable again.”
Lindsay looked from one to the other. “You’re not seriously suggesting that we finance the restoration of a hundred-year-old house with a farm stand?”
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Cici answered carefully, “Actually, I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting anything. But as long as we’re fantasizing . . .”
She turned the legal pad around so that they could see the chart she had made and the numbers written there. “Okay. Just talking, here. This is what I think we can get the place for.” She pointed with her pencil to the top number.
“And this is what I think I can get for each of our houses.” She pointed again, one by one. “Mine, Bridget’s, Lindsay’s. The total . . .” The bottom number made Bridget gasp.
“Now, the rest of this is just speculation and estimate. We know it’s going to need central heat, and upgrades to the bathrooms. Restoration of the outbuildings, including the dairy, I’m figuring at fifty dollars a square foot. It might be less depending on the cost of labor out here. Cleaning up the gardens and orchards, maybe two hundred hours at minimum wage. Of course we’d have to do an awful lot of the cosmetic work ourselves. But if you add up all the numbers, and subtract the outgoing from the incoming . . .” She drew a line under the final figure.
Two pairs of eyes went big. “Oh my God,” Bridget said. “We can afford this.”
“It would be close,” Lindsay pointed out.
Cici nodded and sat back, picking up her wineglass and trying to look casual. “But nice to know you have options. Just in case anyone was wondering.”
They just sat there for a time, lost in their individual thoughts.
Then Lindsay said, “I’ve never been much of a farm girl.”
“Me either,” admitted Bridget.
“Not one of my fantasies,” Cici said.
Lindsay poured more wine. “But what an adventure it would be, huh?”
They turned their attention to the pictures scrolling by on the computer screen.
“I love the light from those windows.”
“Imagine waking up to that view every morning.”
“That little porch off the dining room is just enchanting. With the stone floor and the sunlight coming through the trees like that, it feels like a secret garden.”
“Remember how quiet it was out there? You couldn’t even hear traffic.”
“I don’t know if I could get used to that.”
“Boy, I could,” Cici said.
The other two grinned and agreed, “I could, too.”
Cici said, “Bridge, what does the Internet map say is the nearest town?”
She typed. “Blue Valley, Virginia, population 1,236. And it’s thirty-five miles away.”
“Let me rephrase that. Where’s the nearest town with a Publix grocery, a Barnes & Noble, and a Home Depot?”
Bridget clicked some keys. “There isn’t one.”
Lindsay rolled her eyes. “Well, for that we could go to rural Alaska, or the Australian Outback, or some eight-hundred-year-old village on a cliff in Tuscany.”
“Or,” Bridget said softly, “we could stay right here, where we’ve already