by Donna Ball
“It’s going to be gorgeous,” Derrick said. “Flagstone lined, two waterfalls, a fern grotto, and swim up bar. Salt water, of course.”
“And solar heated,” added Paul.
“Wow.” Lindsay put the biscuit she was about to eat back on her plate. “If I’m going to fit into a swimsuit by June, I’d better start now.”
“Feng shui,” Cici felt compelled to point out politely, “doesn’t really have anything to do with New Year’s Day.”
“For us it does,” Paul assured her, cutting into his French toast. “We met on New Year’s Day, we moved in together on New Year’s Day, and we’re going to site our house so that the front door is in exact alignment with the rising sun on New Year’s Day.”
“That way we’re always looking toward the future,” Derrick added.
Bridget beamed at them. “That’s beautiful.”
Cici leaned her chin on her hand, smiling at them. “You both look ten years younger. I’m so glad this is working out for you.”
“That’s what having an adventure will do for you,” Lindsay agreed. “We were the same way when we moved in here, remember?”
Ida Mae harrumphed and got up from the table, taking her plate with her. “I never heard the like of foolishness. That swimming pool is gonna freeze.”
“We’ll drain it,” Derrick assured her.
“Waste of water.”
“Spring fed.”
She scowled at him. “You gonna eat them grits?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Dutifully, he took the bowl and plopped a spoonful on his plate.
Bridget casually hid her portion of grits under a half a biscuit and some unfinished egg whites, and served herself another half-piece of French toast. “The best time of my life was when we moved in here,” she said reminiscently. “Well, except for when my children were born, of course.”
“And you still look ten years younger,” Paul declared and raised his juice glass in a toast. “To old friends,” he said, “and new beginnings.”
“To your grand adventure,” added Cici as she raised her glass.
Glasses clinked and then Paul noticed the time. He and Derrick finished their breakfasts hurriedly and hugged both cooks before they left, promising to return in plenty of time for the traditional New Year’s feast of black-eyed peas and roast pork loin. The ladies sat at the table for a while after they were gone, nibbling at leftovers and sipping coffee, talking about how much fun it was going to be to have their friends around more often and debating just how easily the sophisticated gentlemen from Baltimore would adjust to life in rural Virginia.
Then Cici said, “You know something? I envy them.”
“Me, too,” said Lindsay with a sigh. “That house sounds gorgeous.”
“Our house is gorgeous,” Bridget objected.
“Except for the roof,” Lindsay said.
“We’ll fix the roof. We always fix things.”
“It’s not that,” Cici said thoughtfully, sipping her coffee. “I mean, look at them. Look at Lori. Look what they have planned for the year. Lori’s getting married. Paul and Derrick are building a house. And what are we doing?”
“Fixing the roof?” suggested Lindsay.
Cici gave her an impatient look. “Growing tomatoes. Reading a book. Making soap.”
“Those are good things,” Bridget said defensively. “Those are the kinds of things we moved here to do.”
Lindsay glanced at Bridget with a wry smile. “But she’s right. Not very adventurous.”
“Well, what do you want to do? Raft the Amazon?”
“I just don’t want to sit around and watch other people starting brand new lives while I’m looking back on mine,” Cici said. “That’s not why we moved here.” She drew in a determined breath and pushed back from the table with both hands. “This year,” she declared, “I want to do something important, too. Something big. Something ambitious.”
A slow consternation crept into the faces of her two friends. “Like what?” asked Lindsay cautiously.
Bridget added, “I was only kidding about the Amazon, you know.”
Cici frowned with a sharp mixture of impatience and uncertainty as she gathered up the dishes nearest her and took them to the sink. “I don’t know. Something.”
Bridget said, “Making soap is something.”
“Something significant.”
Ida Mae took the dishes from Cici and plopped them into a sink full of soapy water. They had a dishwasher, but Ida Mae refused to use it. “Y’all need to tend to your roof,” she advised, “and leave the adventuring to the young folks.”
“Paul and Derrick are the same age we are,” Cici pointed out. “Adventures come in all shapes and sizes.”
Lindsay took the bowl of leftover fruit salad to the work island, where she transferred it to a plastic storage container. “Maybe we could take a trip,” she suggested.
Bridget carried the rest of the dishes to the sink. “Who would take care of the animals?”
“We don’t need a trip,” Cici said. “We need a plan.”
“We’ve got a wedding to plan,” Bridget pointed out. “And two graduations, and a roof to repair, and a kid to get off to college. Not to mention a garden to plant and fruit trees to prune and berry bushes to net and a flock of sheep, a goat, a dog, a deer, and chickens to take care of. Isn’t that enough? And,” she added, almost under her breath, “I’m still going to learn how to make goat’s milk soap.”
The book Paul and Derrick had given them lay on the counter where Cici left it when she brought the last of the champagne glasses to the dishwasher the night before. She ran her hand over the cover absently, then thumbed a few pages.
“It’s not as though we don’t have anything to do,” Lindsay agreed with Bridget. But her gaze was fixed thoughtfully on the vista through the kitchen window: the muddy lawn, the bare branches, the stark winter orchard and abandoned vineyard that marched in sad, straggling rows behind the barn. “It’s just that it’s all kind of routine by now. We need something new.”
“I don’t,” Bridget protested. “I’ve done enough new things in the past four years to last a lifetime.”
“You know,” Lindsay said slowly, turning from the window. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be something completely new.”
A light dawned in Cici’s eyes as she looked up from the book. “Maybe,” she said, “it could be something we didn’t finish.”
“The winery,” they both said at once.
Alarm flashed briefly in Bridget’s eyes. “But—our vines are dead. The hailstorm killed them.”
Lindsay turned to her excitedly. “Not all of them. Only the new ones. Dominic said there was a good chance some of the old ones would come back this spring. And don’t forget, he took all those cuttings just in case.”
“And the old vines are all we need,” Cici said. “If we’re going to restore this place, we should restore it—back to the way it was.” She held up the book like a Bible. “House, gardens, winery, tasting room, everything!”
“Now that’s what I call a project,” declared Lindsay with satisfaction.
“That’s what I call an adventure,” Cici returned, grinning.
Ida Mae stared at them. “You all don’t have the kind of money it takes to run a winery.”
“We’ve got a barn filled with equipment,” Lindsay said, “and that’s the most expensive part.”
“Come on, Ida Mae,” Cici said. “Wouldn’t you like to see Blackwell Farms the way it used to be? Complete with Blackwell Farms wine?”
“It ain’t never gonna be the way it used to be,” she declared flatly and turned back to washing dishes. “And you can’t make Blackwell Farms wine.”
Lindsay and Cici grinned at each other. “But it sure would be fun to try,” Cici said.
“It takes more than a few old vines to make wine,” Bridget said. “Ida Mae is right. I don’t think you should get your hopes up.”
“Well,” conceded Lindsay, “we’ll have
to get Dominic out here, of course, and see what he says.”
Cici and Bridget shared a quick glance and a suppressed smile. Dominic had been the county extension agent until he elected to take an early retirement a few months back, and he was an expert vintner. More importantly, it had been his father who established the original Blackwell Farms Winery in the sixties, and Dominic had served as his apprentice. He’d grown up on Ladybug Farm. When the ladies had their brief flirtation with the idea of restoring the vineyard the previous year, he’d been almost as excited as they were—and almost as disappointed when a freak hailstorm destroyed their efforts overnight.
It was no secret that Dominic had a huge crush on Lindsay. What was slightly less well known—and what had, in fact, been the source of much teasing and speculation over the past year—was how Lindsay felt about him.
“Well,” Bridget conceded, now that the hint of romance was in the air, “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to talk to him.”
“Of course,” agreed Cici, straight-faced. “We have to talk to him.”
Lindsay looked sternly from one to the other, and just as Cici and Bridget were about to burst into giggles, the back door opened and Noah came in.
He was a tall, broad-shouldered eighteen-year-old, whose latest effort at self-expression was a Mohawk haircut and a pierced ear with a silver skull earring. There was nothing to be done about the earring, but apparently he’d already grown tired of the haircut, as evidenced by the bristly growth around his neck and temples. He entered the room in the way of most teenage boys: like a storm wind, dropping his backpack on the floor, shucking out of his leather jacket, letting the door slam behind him.
He rubbed the cold from his hands as he strode toward the breakfast table. “Man, was that a bust. Two little kids wet their beds, and one of them threw up all over the preacher’s wife. Then this other one got a bloody nose, and two of them got lost playing hide-and-seek. We didn’t find them till midnight. ‘The wrath of the Lord is visited upon evil-doers,’ I told them first thing, and that straightened them out, you’d better believe it. Man, this looks good.” He stuffed two biscuits with ham and scraped the last of the French toast and the eggs onto his plate. “All they had for breakfast was donuts. Stale.”
He took an enormous bite of the ham biscuit, dug into the eggs, and chewed for a moment before asking, “So what’s the tarp doing on the roof?” He looked around alertly. “I thought the guys were coming down. What’s been going on?”
They hardly knew where to begin.
~*~
Evenings on Ladybug Farm were special times. As soon as the temperature rose above forty—sometimes even sooner—the three friends would gather on the front porch with a glass of wine to watch the sunset, discuss the day, and count their blessings … or complain about them. But there was a magic to winter evenings, too, when an early dinner was done and the kitchen was cleaned, Ida Mae had retired to her basement suite and Noah to his room to do homework or, more likely, to chat on the phone with his latest girlfriend or play video games on the computer. There was always a fire in the main parlor’s walk-in fireplace, with its fan-brick surround and intricately carved mahogany mantle. When they closed the double doors, it provided enough heat to keep the room shirtsleeve cozy. Two Tiffany lamps turned down low spread a subtle golden glow across the polished heart pine floors and left the high tray ceiling with its carved plaster moldings in shadow. Cici’s two wing chairs and Lindsay’s surprisingly comfortable tapestry demi-sofa were drawn up in a semicircle around Bridget’s tufted velvet ottoman in front of the fireplace. It was there the women gathered on winter evenings with cocoa or cabernet, their slippered feet resting on the community ottoman, a tray of brownies or oatmeal cookies not far from reach.
On the first evening of the New Year, they gathered around the fire and let the sturdy silence of the old house embrace them. They had said good-bye to Paul and Derrick after lunch and, still pleasantly stuffed from the midday repast of curried pork loin, black-eyed peas, hot buttered cornbread, and turnip greens fresh from their own garden, they toasted each other with hot chocolate and nibbled on the last of the fruitcake cookies. The rain had stopped, Ida Mae had gone to bed, and Noah was upstairs, presumably working on the essay portion of his college application.
“I don’t know why he put it off ’til the last minute,” Lindsay said, frowning as she bit into a cookie. “Those applications should’ve been out last month.”
“Getting the application in early doesn’t improve your chances for admission,” Bridget pointed out, absently flipping through the History of Blackwell Farms book. “He’s got twenty days.”
“Yeah, but it does affect your chances of getting financial aid or a scholarship,” Lindsay pointed out, “which we are in desperate need of.” She frowned a little and corrected herself, “Of which we are in desperate need.”
Cici reminded her, “He already got two scholarship offers.”
Lindsay couldn’t prevent a small flush of pride as she admitted, “Well, that’s true.”
She had a right to be proud. When Noah had first come to Ladybug Farm as a virtually homeless waif, his education was sporadic and his attitude sullen and suspicious. Lindsay, a schoolteacher for twenty-five years and a secret artist herself, had uncovered a surprising talent for art in the young man and had bargained art lessons for his attention in math, science, and English. After a year of home schooling, he’d not only caught up with his classmates, but surpassed them and was even awarded a prestigious scholarship to a private school in his junior year. If Lindsay was ambitious for him, it was with justification.
“But,” she said, “the basketball scholarship is practically worthless—it’s only partial tuition for one year and you know what happens to those kids the first time they tear an ACL—and, well, as much as I’d like to see him at SCAD, Savannah is so far away, and besides, their program is limited. We could get a full financial aid package to UVA, or maybe even William and Mary, if he’d just try. Now that’s an education.”
“I definitely vote for UVA,” Bridget said. “He could be home weekends.”
Cici’s smile was wistful. “Just like Lori.”
Bridget tasted her chocolate, then paused. “Do you know what would be great in this? Some of that Kahlua Kevin sent us from Mexico.”
Bridget’s son, Kevin, was a DC attorney who had chosen to spend his Christmas holidays on the sunny beaches of Mexico. The elaborate gifts he sent had more than made up for his absence at the Christmas table, and in fact, had inspired the ladies to suggest that he vacation in Paris next year.
Everyone agreed that a touch of Kahlua would be just the thing, although Cici felt compelled to point out, “This is how people gain fifteen pounds over the holidays.”
Bridget brought the Kahlua from the corner cabinet that sat beneath a stained-glass window, which depicted a field of lilies against a blue sky. “Actually,” she said, pouring a generous dollop into each upheld cup, “a new study says that the average person only gains two pounds over Christmas.”
“Ha,” said Lindsay, swirling the liquor into the chocolate with the tip of her index finger. “Whoever did that study has never spent Christmas at Ladybug Farm.”
“Well, this is the last of it,” declared Cici, raising her cup in a toast. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet.”
“Famous last words,” muttered Lindsay, but she clinked her mug against the others and then made a muffled sound of pleasure as she tasted the hot chocolate.
They settled back for a moment of chocolate-Kahlua bliss, listening to the crackle of the fire and the occasional overhead squeak of a floorboard that told them Noah was still up and about. Bridget’s feet, clad in snug slipper socks with fuzzy sheep woven into the knit design, stretched toward the radiant heat of the fireplace, and she murmured, “Do you know what I like best about this house in the winter? The smell. It’s like opening up an old trunk and the whole past comes flooding out.”
“Hmm.” Cici s
ipped her chocolate. “I can’t believe it’s been four years since we first saw this place.”
Lindsay smiled at her. “I can’t believe we’re going to have a wedding.”
“Me either,” Cici admitted.
“Will she wear your wedding gown?”
Cici gave a snort of amusement. “Hardly. I burned that baby the minute the divorce was final.”
Bridget said, “Well, look at this.” Her eyes were on the book again, although now with renewed interest. “It says here that during the sixties, people came from as far away as Europe—Europe!—to attend the dinner pairings at the Blackwell Farms tasting room. Can you imagine? They built entire meals around their wines.”
“How about that?” Lindsay said. “Ida Mae must have done the cooking for them. We should ask her about it.”
“The sixties,” said Cici, smiling reminiscently. “Do you remember the sixties?”
“Of course not,” replied Lindsay archly, sipping her cocoa. “I was an infant.”
Cici kicked her ankle.
“It says here they entertained politicians, movie stars, and heads of state. Right here on Ladybug Farm.”
“Do you realize,” said Cici, “that if I still had any of that cheap-o furniture I bought when I first married, it would be legitimately considered antique?”
“Bridget’s Fiesta ware is antique,” Lindsay pointed out, “worth a fortune. And she got it with Green Stamps.”
“Remember Green Stamps?” Again, Cici’s smile was wistful.
“Of course not,” said Lindsay, sipping her chocolate. “I wasn’t even born.”
Cici gave her a dry look. “Well, I remember my mother using them.”
“A lot of wineries have restaurants on the premises,” said Bridget speculatively. “Remember, girls, all those great little cafes we visited in Sonoma? They were all attached to wineries.”
The other two looked at her.
“Well,” said Bridget a little defensively, “if Ida Mae could cook for heads of state, I don’t know why I can’t.”
Lindsay said, “I don’t either.”
And Cici lifted an eyebrow. “I thought you were happy making goat soap.”
