At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [75]
May Flowers
Where we love is home.
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR.
14
In Another Time
Emmy Marie, 1967
Andrew Jackson Blackwell was forty-five years old, about to be elected District Court judge, and in love with a woman half his age. If it had happened to anyone else, he would have laughed.
The problem was that he did not think of himself as old. He was still as tall and straight shouldered as when he had worn his army uniform. He had a full head of coal black hair and straight white teeth and when he looked in the mirror he saw a boy of twenty-three, toasting the fine long legs of a honey-haired mademoiselle with mischief in her eyes. As his mother told him all too often, life had been too good to him.
She did not know his heart was broken, as hers had been, that he had had to leave his brother behind in an unmarked grave in Germany. She did not know that he had loved only once, briefly and passionately, and had watched his beloved’s blood spill between his desperate, rain-soaked fingers onto a cobbled street in France. She did not know that afterward there was a hole inside him, because he worked so hard to cover it up with big plans and glad hands and fine dinners and lots and lots of laughter. And the truth was that until Emmy Marie came along some twenty years later to fill it, even he had almost forgotten the hole existed.
She was fresh out of William & Mary with a degree in art history, of all the useless things, and she had promised her mother she would call Miss Emily before she left Virginia. Emily Blackwell never forgot one of her “girls,” as she referred to the young soldiers’ wives to whom she had offered a home during the war, and when it turned out one had given birth to a daughter who was named after her, she naturally invited her namesake to come out to the house for a weekend.
She was a blond-haired bundle of charm in a Pucci-print minidress who threw herself into Emily Blackwell’s arms and hugged her as though she were a long-lost aunt, and then turned the same exuberant affection on Ida Mae, about whom her mother had told so many stories. Andrew noted her arrival, but he was busy in the vineyard that time of year and barely looked at her until dinner that night, when she enchanted him as effortlessly as she did everyone else at the table.
It was his mother who suggested Emmy might enjoy a tour of the winery, and, although he told himself he was only being the polite host, he found himself enjoying the sound of her laughter on the warm dewy air the next morning, and the faint breeze of her perfume as it mingled with the scent of the vines. He told her how he had fallen in love with the wine country of France during the war, and how its misty valleys and rolling hills had reminded him of home. And how he had wondered why the great wines of the Loire Valley, which was so similar in climate and topography to the Shenandoah Valley, could not be reproduced across the ocean.
She laughed as he told her how he and his French friend Robert DuPoncier had smuggled vine cuttings out of the country under their shirts and had almost gotten caught twice but had evaded the customs officials by pretending to be suffering with food poisoning. He had actually vomited all over one poor fellow’s shoes. He told her how Robert, who had worked at wine making in every chateau in the valley in hopes of one day creating his own vintage, had believed in his dream and left his own country for the valleys of Virginia to make it come true. They had grafted and coddled those cuttings, brutally pruning and tenderly nursing, cutting away and preserving, until they had a grape that was uniquely their own. He told her of the hopes they had had for each year’s vintage, how some years had been disasters of such proportions that bottles actually exploded in the rack, and how others had produced decent, drinkable wines, and others, as the years went on, were even better until now they were actually beginning to win awards, and Robert, who had given up so much to invest in Andrew’s dream, was so proud that Andrew threatened