At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [1]
PS3552.A4545A95 2009
813’.54—dc22 2009019127
http://us.penguingroup.com
March Hares
Homes really are no more than the people who live in them.
—NANCY REAGAN
1
Rushing the Season
Somewhere upon the small, blue, slowly rotating globe that over thirty billion people call home, a snowplow spewed dirty gray snow into banks on either side of the pavement. A housewife with chapped knuckles tugged frozen laundry off the line, and a fisherman cut a careful hole in the ice and dropped his hook. Children, wrapped in so many layers of winter clothing they could barely move, waddled like penguins toward the school bus stop, and windshield wipers beat a weary timpani against an icy rain while commuters dreamed of warm tropical destinations.
But in a place called Virginia, in a valley called Shenandoah, a rising sun melted the last puddle of snow. A crocus bloomed, and an easterly wind ruffled the unfurling blossoms of an apple tree. Spring had come to Ladybug Farm.
And not a moment too soon.
Barely a year ago, Lindsay Wright, Cici Burke, and Bridget Tindale had turned their backs on their suburban lives in Baltimore, Maryland, for the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia. They had seen each other through divorce, widowhood, and child raising for over twenty-five years; they had traveled to Italy, Greece, France, Mexico, and the British Isles together; they had shared hopes, failures, and difficult truths with one another. But when they stumbled upon the one-hundred-year-old mansion during a routine vacation trip through the mountains, they knew their greatest adventure had just begun.
Their initial plan had been simple. Lindsay, who years earlier had abandoned her lifelong dream of becoming an artist for a much more practical role as an elementary school teacher, planned to turn the dairy barn into an art studio. Cici’s passion for building was tailor-made for the myriad of projects that were just waiting to be tackled. And Bridget, a recent widow who once had dreamed of opening her own restaurant, was enraptured by the prospect of growing her own herbs and vegetables, creating her own recipes, and having someone to cook for again.
They had all, of course, underestimated what it took—both in terms of finances and energy—to restore a grand, hundred-year-old house. The sixteen acres of cultivated gardens, fruit trees, berry bushes, and grapevines, not to mention the sheds, outbuildings, reflecting pools, fishponds, and fountains, had seemed outrageously romantic and luxurious when they first toured the property. They envisioned restoring the blackened statues to gleaming alabaster, cleaning out the murky pools, setting the fountains to bubbling and splashing again, and lounging in beautifully painted Adirondack chairs in the rose garden, sipping wine and admiring the wonders of nature that surrounded them.
So far they had uncovered one stone path, and restored a two-foot-tall garden wall.
The sheer enormity of mowing, pruning, harvesting, and preserving all that was theirs was simply overwhelming. That was where Noah had come in. The sullen, unkempt teenager who had shown up one day to mow their lawn had been a godsend—even after they discovered he was camping on their property and living off what he could steal from their kitchen garden. He pruned bushes, he tied up vines, he cut and stacked firewood, he did heavy lifting; on one memorable occasion, he even helped kill a rattlesnake. Gradually, he had become part of the family.
Over the past year, the three women had discovered that neither their budget nor their master plan turned out to have any basis in reality. They worked harder in their retirement than they ever had at the jobs from which they had spent twenty years looking forward to retiring. They had started out with a beautiful old house and had ended up with a flock of sheep and a vicious sheepdog, a yearling deer who thought he was a house pet, a rebellious teenage boy, a cranky, ancient housekeeper—and Cici’s twenty-year-old