A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [77]
“We’ll have to talk to him before then,” Lindsay admitted. “But until then . . . couldn’t we just pretend we don’t know?”
The ladies were silent for a while, watching the shadows lengthen on the mountains while a fading sun speared streaks of orange through the naked, severed branches of the poplar tree. Already the lawn, which barely two weeks ago had been littered with debris, was cleared of brush and fallen leaves, and piles of hickory and poplar wood, neatly cut into two-foot lengths, awaited splitting and stacking. But the flower beds showed the neglect of the women’s late-summer preoccupation with preserving food, and the roses were badly in need of trimming. There were still pecans to be harvested, grapevines to be pruned and tied, and black walnuts littered the ground on either side of the drive—all of which would have been lost had not Noah mowed back the weeds that once hid them.
Bridget said, “He’s been an awful lot of help.”
And Cici added, “He certainly has been more reliable than I ever thought he’d be.”
“Of course his manners could use some improvement,” Bridget added.
“Not to mention his attitude,” said Cici. And she fixed a pointed look on Bridget. “Neither one of which are our responsibility.”
“He likes to draw,” Lindsay said, and when the other two looked at her she gave an embarrassed little shrug. “He had a sketchbook. I peeked. He’s really not bad. In fact, he’s pretty good. Okay, I know it doesn’t mean anything, and I know he’s a dropout and a runaway and a garden thief, and more than likely on his way to state prison by the time he’s twenty but . . . he likes to draw. That’s something, isn’t it?”
Bridget and Cici smiled, and leaned back in their chairs. The orange streaks in the sky grew purple, and finally gray. The shadows on the porch turned deep blue, and the air had a crisp, cool undertaste to it. The crickets and the tree frogs had retired to wherever it is such creatures go for the winter, and no birds sang after dark. The only sound was the creak of their rocking chairs, and from somewhere beyond the tree line, the warble of an owl.
Bridget said after a time, “I don’t think it’s just us. I think if everyone in America could watch their fruit grow from a flower and spend hours fighting the wasps for their berries there would be a lot fewer apples tossed out after just one bite, and everyone would make jelly.”
“And I’ll tell you something else,” Cici added. “If everyone had to pack up and carry off his own garbage like we do, we could solve the landfill problem in this country in less than a decade.”
“When you have to dig your own well,” Lindsay remarked sagely, “you don’t leave the water running while you brush your teeth.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard that axiom.”
“It’s true though. It means no one wants to waste a precious resource, once they realize how precious it is.”
Everyone murmured agreement with that, and then they rocked in silence, snuggling down in their sweaters, and thinking about Noah in the woods.
15
On Children and Other Creatures of the Wild
The leaves took on hues of strawberry, lemon, and brilliant tangerine gold, the mountains burst into fiery colors almost overnight, and the cobalt days grew shorter—and colder—by the minute. The stack of hickory and poplar grew steadily higher by the back door as Noah spent his mornings splitting wood, and his afternoons dragging debris out of the dairy.
When the first dusting of morning frost stiffened the grass, Cici tried to light a fire in the fireplace and filled the downstairs with billows of blue smoke. Farley came to clean the chimneys of squirrels’ nests, and charged ten dollars.
Sam arrived to install the new fans for their air-conditioning system, which, to his utter delight, worked exactly as he had predicted, blowing an arctic breeze through every room of the house and sending the women squealing and scurrying for their coats. By way of apology, he helped them start up the antiquated wood-burning furnace, which,