by Donna Ball
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
March Hares
Chapter 1 - Rushing the Season
Chapter 2 - Family Meeting
Chapter 3 - In Another Time
Chapter 4 - Discoveries
Chapter 5 - History Lessons
Chapter 6 - In Another Time
Chapter 7 - Sheepshearing
April Showers
Chapter 8 - Blackberry Winter
Chapter 9 - Company
Chapter 10 - More Company
Chapter 11 - In Another Time
Chapter 12 - The Art of Parenting
Chapter 13 - Easter
May Flowers
Chapter 14 - In Another Time
Chapter 15 - Changes
Chapter 16 - Making Adjustments
Chapter 17 - It Never Rains But . . .
Chapter 18 - In Another Time
Chapter 19 - Hard Choices
Chapter 20 - Coming Home
Chapter 21 - Mother’s Day
Chapter 22 - Stories
EPILOGUE
A Change of Plan
They were silent for a while, listening to birdsong, watching the colors deepen over the mountains and the shadows swallow up the lawn. Then a sudden stream of lamplight poured into the dusky shadows of the porch as the front door opened, the screen door squeaked, and Lori burst out. “I’ve got it!” she exclaimed. “I’ve got the plan.”
She bounced to a stop in front of them, a yellow legal pad in her hands, a very pleased expression on her face. “What we’ll do,” she declared, “is turn this house into a bed-and-breakfast.”
Cici lifted an eyebrow. The other two sipped their wine and said nothing.
“I was talking to Ida Mae this afternoon,” she went on. “Did you know this place used to be a boarding house for military wives in the forties?”
Cici said, surprised, “I didn’t know that.”
Lindsay and Bridget looked at Lori with new interest. “Is that right?” Bridget said.
And Lindsay added, “A boarding house?”
Lori nodded. “That’s probably how we ended up with all those bathrooms. A house full of women . . .”
Cici grinned and lifted her glass to sip. “How about that? And sixty years later, it’s still a house full of women.”
Also by Donna Ball
A YEAR ON LADYBUG FARM
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This book is an original publication of the Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2009 by Donna Ball
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
eISBN : 978-1-101-14063-5
1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Shenandoah River Valley (Va. and W. Va.)—Fiction.
3. Farmhouses—Conservation and restoration—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
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 daughter Lori, who was herself a force of nature. The six-bedroom house, with maid’s quarters, a wine cellar, a spacious attic, and multiple living areas, had shrunk to the size of a beach cabana over the winter, and the effort to blend such widely divergent personalities into some semblance of a functioning household had been, in Lindsay’s words, “slightly more fun than spending the winter with the Donner party.”
Repeated snowstorms had kept them housebound. Lindsay had tried to burn green wood in the fireplace and the resulting soot and black smoke had taken weeks to scrub off the wall. Lori, whose youthful enthusiasm was matched only by her good intentions, kept trying to improve everything. Noah spent most of his time with the animals and, when he was forced to stay inside with the others, seemed to go out of his way to be miserable. The housekeeper, Ida Mae, and Bridget stirred up a familiar feud about the division of household chores. Cici, who spent the winter recovering from a fall from the roof, couldn’t get to her workshop, and Lindsay’s studio was so cold that her paints froze in the tubes. To date, things were not exactly working out as they had planned.
But spring was here. They had survived. Somehow, the old house had become home for all of them, and in truth, none of the women would have traded their lives on Ladybug Farm for those of anyone else on the planet.
On most days, anyway.
“For the last time,” Cici told her daughter, not bothering to try to disguise the impatience in her voice, “we are not getting a satellite dish.”
“But for the low introductory price of $99 a month we can have 150 television channels plus high-speed Internet!” Lori flapped the sales brochure in front of her mother’s face.
Since Cici was on her hands and knees at the moment, scooping out a shovelful of ashes from the fireplace, her daughter’s gesture had the unfortunate result of sending a shower of white ash over the hearth, the floor, and Cici. Lori stepped back quickly, chagrined, and grabbed the broom. “What I mean is,” she went on, undeterred, “you know how Aunt Bridget is always running back and forth to the library. If we had high-speed Internet, think how much gas she’d save!”
It was generally agreed among those who knew them that Lori got her looks and her charm from her father, and her obstinacy and determination from her mother. Cici, with her long legs, athletic build, and thick, honey-colored hair—not to mention the thousands of freckles, made even more prominent by a year of outdoor work—bore little physical resemblance to the petite, copper-haired Lori. But when the two women’s eyes met in willful conviction over conflicting goals—which seemed to be the only kind of goals they had these days—they were mirror images of each other.
Cici glared at her daughter. “Do you know where they have really good high-speed Internet? At the University of Virginia dorms. Where, I believe we all agreed, you were supposed to be by now.”
Lori returned a hurt look that was noticeably lacking in sincerity. “It wasn’t my fault that my transcripts didn’t get here from UCLA in time for me to be accepted for the spring.”
“They didn’t get here in time because you didn’t send for them in time,” Cici pointed out. “And I don’t think I have to point out that a transfer acceptance is not the same as an enrollment.”
Lori said, “I thought we agreed it would be good for me to take some time to think about the direction I wanted my life to take.”
“And so you have.”
“I’m just not convinced college is the right place for me right now.”
“That makes one of us.”
“It would be a lot easier for me to research my options,” Lori pointed out single-mindedly, “if we had high-speed Internet.”
Cici bit back a reply that she knew would be a waste of breath. After what Lori had termed a “less than satisfactory experience” at UCLA, it had not seemed unreasonable for her to take the winter off while she completed the paperwork for the transfer to UVA. But as more and more weeks passed, Lori grew less interested in returning to college at all. And while Cici loved having her daughter around, this was not a battle she intended to lose.
She simply knew better than to continue to fight it with words.
So she said instead, “I don’t know what you’re whining about high-speed Internet for, anyway. Your father is paying a fortune every month for that fancy Internet phone of yours.”
Cici’s ex-husband was a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer. He had greeted Lori’s decision to drop out of UCLA and return to live with her mother in Virginia with a mixture of outrage and—as the responsibilities of fatherhood had never particularly suited him—thinly disguised relief. His way of dealing with emotions had always been through expensive gifts, and the phone was his way of saying “keep in touch.”
Lori made a face. “Which only works when the moon is in Scorpio and the wind is out of the southwest.”
Cici shrugged. One of the things she loved most about being surrounded by mountains was the limited access to technology. It slowed life down, and took out the background noise. “You can get perfectly good cell phone reception if you go to the top of the hill and face the antenna toward the east.”
“A lot of fun when it’s seventeen degrees outside, Mom.”
“Do you know where they have really good cell phone reception?”
“The University of Virginia dorms, yeah, I know. Listen, I’ve been thinking—”
“Lord preserve us.” Cici coughed and brushed ash out of her air as Lori’s enthusiastic sweeping stirred up another cloud of dust. “Will you give me that broom? You’re just making a mess.”
Lori turned over the broom and dustpan without protest. “We should take a vote,” she declared. “You’re always saying we’re a family, aren’t you? And families decide important things together. I’ll bet Aunt Bridget would love to have high-speed Internet. And where’s that boy?”
Cici looked up from her sweeping with an exasperated look. “Will you stop calling him that? You’ve lived under the same roof for four months and his name is Noah, as you know perfectly well. And, as you also know perfectly well, today is his court date.”
Lori rolled her eyes expressively. “Oh, right. You mean juvenile court. Trouble, that’s what his name is.”
“It’s just a traffic ticket, Lori. There’s no need to make it sound like he robbed a liquor store.”
“If I had been cited for driving without a license when I was fifteen you would have made me wish I’d robbed a liquor store!” returned Lori smartly. “You all are way too easy on him, if you ask me—and I know, no one did. But maybe you should, now and then. I’m just trying to help.”
Cici finished sweeping the ash into the dustpan with small deliberate movements, and straightened up, regarding her daughter with an exaggerated display of patience. “My beautiful girl,” she said, “light of my life. It’s been a long winter. We’re all a little cranky. But you are standing in a six-thousand-square-foot, one-hundred-year-old house with walls that need to be painted, floors that need to be stripped, windows that need to be washed, and rugs that need to be cleaned, in the middle of a working farm with animals t
hat have to be fed, stalls that must be be raked out, ground that needs to be turned, porches and walks that have to be swept, and gutters that need to be cleaned. And if you don’t find something useful to do within the next thirty seconds I am going to strangle you.”
Lori said meekly, “I think I’ll help Aunt Bridget in the garden.”
Replied Cici with a hard look, “Good plan.”
Lori grabbed the sales brochure as she scurried out of the room.
She cut through the big stone and brick kitchen on her way to the backyard. The kitchen was filled with windows, and every windowsill was filled with flat plastic trays of seedlings that Bridget had been nurturing all winter. The room smelled like woodsmoke and vanilla, and, oddly, like vinegar. Lori wrinkled her nose and glanced around, and that was when she noticed Ida Mae half in and half out of one of the oversize industrial ovens. Her hands were clad in yellow rubber gloves up to the elbow, and she was scrubbing out the oven with a mixture of baking soda and vinegar.
“What is it about the first warm day that makes everyone want to clean something?” observed Lori, snagging a chocolate chip cookie from the jar on the counter.
Ida Mae craned her head around, swept her gaze over Lori’s low-slung jeans and belly-skimming tank top, and scowled. “Put some clothes on, child. You’re a disgrace.”
Ida Mae was a square angular woman of undetermined age with blunt-cut iron gray hair and a habit of dressing in oddly matched layers. Today she wore a plaid wool shirtwaist dress over cotton dungarees and a purple turtleneck, topped by a pink cardigan and a gingham apron. Her face, etched with lines, rarely smiled, and her ears never missed a word that was said in the house—whether or not the words were meant to be heard.
