A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [62]
“All of that stuff about where we were from and what we used to do and how long we’d been married and how much we’d already put into fixing up the house,” Cici said, shaking her head in amazement as she started the engine, “that was the loan application!”
“Life in a small town,” Bridget said with a single, amazed shake of her head.
“Sign me up,” said Lindsay, and they all grinned in agreement.
It rained. It rained and it rained. The lawn mower stood idle in the shed and the grass grew higher and higher. Weeds invaded the flower gardens and even the roses hung their soggy heads. Puddles the size of small ponds formed in the backyard, and rivulets of mud ran from the newly excavated drain field.
Every morning Bridget pulled on rain gear and sloshed out to the meadow to check on the sheep, while the sheepdog—currently called Flower for the skunk in Bambi, whom he was growing to resemble more each day—barked and growled and darted at her legs, occasionally leaving teeth marks in her rain boots. Nonetheless, Bridget would return each morning to cook up a new recipe for chicken livers—which the dog promptly and predictably rejected. When she discovered that the sheep actually spent most of their day under a clean, dry shed at the edge of the property she relaxed a little, and started to call her morning trudge through the rain “walking the dog.”
Sam finished installing the ceiling fans, repairing the ceiling, and engineering his cooling system; he went home to await the delivery of the exhaust fans he had ordered from California. Farley finished installing the new circuit box and replacing the outlets throughout the house. Now that the rain had brought cooler temperatures, Cici tackled the sunroom, prying open the painted-shut windows, scraping and sanding the walls, cutting new molding, and beginning the painstaking process of restoring the tiles. Lindsay devoted herself to her bedroom project, and the only clue the other women had as to her final design choice were the various flecks of paint that accumulated on her clothing and under her fingernails.
On the afternoon that the rain finally faded to gurgles and drips from the gutters and the sky lightened to a silver blue, Lindsay carried out a final load of trash—which included stained plastic dropcloths, empty paint cans, and buckets coated with dried white plaster—dusted off her hands, and declared, “Tah-dah!”
Bridget looked up from sweeping muddy paw prints off the front porch. “You can’t mean you’ve finished!”
And Cici, her hair tucked under a baseball cap to protect it from paint flakes, pulled down her respirator mask as she came around the corner from the sunroom. “Is this the grand opening?”
Lindsay grinned as she led the way upstairs to her room. She paused outside the closed door for dramatic effect, and then opened it with a flourish.
She had applied a smooth coat of plaster directly over the wallpaper, glazed it with four different shades of soft, dusky green, and then polished the whole to a subtle satin sheen. Directly atop the plastered walls she had used a sculpting compound to form leaves, ferns, and delicate botanicals in bas relief, and painted them various tones of the same muted greens she had used on the walls. The effect was of a misty garden, with leaves and grasses growing directly out of the walls.
“Oh, Lindsay,” Bridget said softly. Her eyes were wide as she gazed around the room. “Will you do this in my room?”
Lindsay grinned, making no effort to hide her own pleasure in the result. “It turned out okay, if I do say so myself.”
Cici lightly touched one of the sculptures, and glanced at Lindsay. “Joint compound?”
She nodded. “You can do anything with it. Let it dry and seal it, and you can’t tell it from plaster.”
“You have got to e-mail a picture of this to Paul and Derrick,” Bridget said. “Wouldn’t they just die?