A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [28]
Their beds were made, the kitchen unpacked, and the Ladybug Farm sign was restored, albeit rather crookedly, to its place beside the drive. The remainder of their possessions— boxes, furniture, lamps, wardrobes—were huddled in random corners throughout the enormous house. Even deciding what belonged to whom was a task so daunting that it seemed to hover on the edge of impossibility. One by one, they wandered out onto the porch and sat there on the steps, drinking up the cool, sweet taste of the night air and sharing the silence of utter exhaustion until slowly, in stages, the ache in their muscles and the fuzziness in their heads were replaced by a kind a wonder, a still and reverent awe.
“I never knew,” Lindsay said softly after a while, “that it got this dark anywhere in the world.”
“Or this quiet,” agreed Bridget, almost in a whisper.
The light that spilled from the uncurtained windows behind them illuminated the porch in a pale yellow glow, cast their silhouetted shadows on the steps, and was swallowed up in the blackness that was the lawn. Overhead, the sky was a network of stars, more stars than any of them had ever imagined existed before, a hundred million dancing globes suspended in the viscous liquid of space, a three-dimensional spectacle of near and far, small and large, brilliant and muted. There were no stars in the suburbs. There was no darkness, and there was no silence. To sit there, suspended in the midst of such a rare and unanticipated gift, made them feel almost guilty, as though if they breathed too deeply of the sweet-smelling air or lost themselves too totally to the mesmeric canopy overhead they might take more than their share, and leave less for those less fortunate.
“It makes you think,” said Cici after a time, “about how the first men must have felt, hundreds of thousands of years ago, squatting outside their caves, looking up . . . dwarfed by all this.”
“It must have been terrifying.”
“Makes you understand why they worshiped the sun.”
“Funny thing though,” Cici said. “In the city, the dark was something to be afraid of. You know, dark alleys, dark parking garages, dark corners. Out here it just seems . . .”
When she floundered, at a loss for words, Bridget supplied, “Magnificent.”
“Yeah,” agreed Cici with a slow smile. “Huge, and magnificent.”
“Kind of like what we’ve just done,” said Lindsay.
“It was huge all right,” said Cici. “The magnificent part . . . I don’t know yet.”
“It’s not like we moved to Africa,” Bridget pointed out.
“Africa, Virginia . . .” Lindsay shrugged. “I’ve slept in the same room for twenty-three years. Tonight when I get up to go to the bathroom, I won’t know where it is. My doctor, my dentist, and my grocery store are in another state. The guy at the mini-mart doesn’t know me. There is no mini-mart. The air smells different. This isn’t home.”
Bridget released a slow, soft breath, and agreed, “Yeah.”
Cici leaned back on her palms, gazing at the stars. “It’s scary, what we’ve done.”
“Yeah,” agreed Lindsay.
“The world is a scary place,” Bridget said, in a moment. She slipped one arm through Cici’s, and the other through Lindsay’s. “I’m glad you guys are in it.”
The other two smiled tiredly, and leaned inward, and they sat like that in a silence that no longer seemed quite so deep, until it was time to go to bed.
7
Settling In
Lindsay loved lists. She liked to make plans, write them down, check them off. Doing so gave her a sense of order and accomplishment. And in a project as big as this one it made her believe, however temporarily, that accomplishment was actually possible.
So, on the morning of the tenth day, she sat at the breakfast table with Cici and Bridget, a pot of coffee and a fragrant plate of blueberry muffins between them, contentedly going over her list. At a yard sale before leaving Baltimore, they had found a battered white wicker dining room set, which, with a little spray paint and a cheerful daffodil-patterned tablecloth, was perfect