A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [31]
Since that day of gorging on mass communications, none of them had used the telephone once. They still did not know their telephone number, though they promised themselves they would stop by the telephone company office to inquire the next time they were in town. And no one could remember why it had seemed so important that they have telephone service in the first place.
The days had a different kind of rhythm here. They rose early, but they were never in a hurry. They never lacked for something to do—as evidenced by Lindsay’s list, which took up more and more pages of the blue-lined legal tablet—but they never felt guilty for simply sitting and gazing at the mountains. The very texture of their lives was different. Accustomed to going from their air-conditioned homes to their air-conditioned cars to their air-conditioned workplaces, they now slept with their windows open to all the sounds and scents of the night, dined in the open air, and worked all day in the sun. Once they had been accustomed to staying up for the eleven o’clock news and being shocked into groggy wakefulness by the shrill blare of an alarm clock; now they awoke with the sun and were in bed, exhausted, by dark. They had been on Ladybug Farm little over a week, and the lives they once had lived seemed like someone else’s memories.
“Okay,” Lindsay said, turning over a page in the tablet. “Not bad for the first couple of days. The downstairs is completely unpacked, the living room window frames are scraped and painted, and the staircase is finished.”
They had spent the past two days on their hands and knees and, one enormous curved stair at a time, used steel wool and sandpaper to scrape away the layers of dark, dull wax. Washing away the residue with mineral spirits, they applied a fresh coat of wax to each of the twenty-four stairs and the landing, and then buffed each stair to a high sheen by hand. The results were spectacular, but the effort had taught them a valuable lesson about the physical toll an excess of ambition could take.
“I don’t suppose . . .” She looked at the other two tentatively. “Anyone is interested in tackling the living room floors?”
The expressions her friends returned was the only answer she needed. “Right,” she said quickly, making a strike on the pad. “We’ll come back to that one.”
“You know what we really need to do,” observed Cici, cradling her coffee cup in both hands as she leaned back in the cushioned wicker chair. “We need to take a weekend and go antiquing. I’ll bet there are some great places around here where we could pick up some things that would really suit this house.”
The other two nodded agreement. As the interior of the house slowly began to take shape they couldn’t help but be struck by the enormity of the decorating task that lay before them. Bridget’s grand piano went into the front bay window. Cici’s damask wing chairs were arranged before the fireplace and Lindsay’s grandmother’s Queen Anne table went beneath the stained glass window. An occasional table here, a mirror there, and it hadn’t taken long to realize that their meager possessions were dwarfed by the oversize rooms of the mansion.
“The landing really cries out for a grandfather clock,” observed Bridget with a sigh.
“Paintings on the walls,” Lindsay said. “That’s what we need.”
“That’s what we have a resident artist for,” Cici pointed out, and Lindsay grimaced.
“I mean real paintings,” she said. “You know, from the period. The house should tell a story.”
Before moving, they had agreed that, while their personal bedrooms could be decorated in any style they chose, the downstairs areas of the house should remain true to the period. That was one reason that the downstairs rooms were so sparsely furnished.
Bridget said, examining a chipped nail, “Remember when we used to have time to do things like antiquing?”
“Anyway,” admitted Cici reluctantly, “we shouldn’t get any more furniture until we refinish the floors. And before we do the floors, we really should paint.”
“But before