A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [72]
There was a trail that followed the stream, and she ran along it for about a hundred yards until she turned her ankle on a stone and almost fell. No harm done though. By that time she was breathing hard and her calves ached, and she was starting to understand why people didn’t run in the country. Aside from the innate hazards, there was simply too much to see. And when you ran, you missed it all.
Although it was too early in the season for the foliage to have officially reached its peak fall color, the woods were awash in shades of delicate yellow, sherbert orange, and pale maroon. Interspersed with the fading green of a late summer’s memory, the delicate turning of the colors of the leaves made walking down the wooded path feel like being immersed in a watercolor painting. The air tasted cool and damp, and mist clung to the multicolored ground beneath her running shoes. Lindsay shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her velour jogging jacket and slowed her stride, taking it all in.
Aside from the days spent digging up stones from the streambed, none of them had had the time over the summer to explore the property, and Lindsay had never been this deep into the woods before. The path meandered away from the stream, sometimes overgrown by weeds or blocked by fallen trees, and eventually opened onto a small, misty glade. Lindsay caught her breath.
There it was. The folly.
It hardly looked like the gingerbread house Sonya Maxwell had described. There was a round turretlike structure topped with rusted tin on one side, attached to an octagonal-shaped main room with a multipaneled, similarly rusted-out tin roof. There were three windows in each wall—although the glass was missing now—making the whole more of a gazebo than a house. The green paint that Sonya had described was completely gone now, leaving nothing but bare gray wood, and the delicate scrollwork trim was either hanging from the eaves by a single nail or rotting on the ground.
Lindsay picked her way through the briars and weeds that surrounded the structure, her breath suspended in awe as she imaged the charm this place must have held for another generation. She understood the reason for the path now, and imagined a horse-drawn wagon, filled with picnic baskets and revelers, traversing it. Or a woman in high-button boots and a bustle gown, strolling down the path with a volume of poetry under her arm, bound for an afternoon of solitary reading in this enchanted place, with nothing but the rustle of the grasses and the chirping of the birds for company.
What was it Sonya had said? That a folly was a rich man’s extravagance, a building with no practical purpose whatsoever? If that was the case, this was not a folly, because it had obviously served a very important purpose in the lives of the people who had lived here a hundred years ago, and already Lindsay was envisioning how it might be brought back to life.
There was a circular porch with some missing and rotting boards, and Lindsay climbed up on it carefully. The sagging door still had a few shards of glass intact in one of its six panes, and Lindsay imaged how charming it must have been in its prime. She used her shoulder to assist the stiff hinges and pushed inside.
Dusty light filtered in from the windows surrounding the circular room. There was a sweet little marble fireplace with carved cherubs on either side, now black with smoke and age. There was a sprinkling of dried leaves on the stained marble floor, but the wind had swept most of them into a corner. Against one wall was an old settee, once upholstered in what appeared to be wine brocade that the rats and squirrels had made short work of long ago. There was a wrought iron table with peeling white