Claire Cook The Wildwater Walking Club (epu

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.“They’re so cute.” I wasn’t sure I believed that, but I thought I’d try it on for size.“Sometimes they’re cute,” Rosie said.“As long as nobody messes with them.They had a bad rooster before Rod, and they ganged up on him and killed him.”“What did he do?” I whispered.I was back in my house-on-the-market zone again.Rosie shifted her hands on the ladder.“Besides fertilizing the eggs, a rooster’s job is to scout for danger, to keep the hens safe from predators, even to lay his own life on the line to protect them if he has to.The last rooster just didn’t really give a shit about them.And hens don’t take disloyalty lightly.”“Wow,” I said.“That’s so impressive.”“Yeah,” Rosie said.“You can learn a lot from chickens.”Tess started making her way down the ladder, pulling a lengthening white cord with her.“Okay,” she said.“Now we just attach a screw hook to the tree, loop this doohickey at the end of the clothesline over the hook, and you’ll be officially breaking the law.If you need to get it down in a hurry, just unhook it from the tree, and it will retract automatically.You’ll have to reach out from your kitchen window to feed the line down to someone on the ground, or borrow my ladder, to set it up again, but there’s really no way around that.”As soon as the clothesline was attached to the tree, we carried the ladder back to Tess’s house and moved on to the garden.Rosie pushed my box of Special K out of the way and picked up a shovel.“So,” she said.“I’m envisioning an informal lavender patch.I brought starter plants in three varieties—Grosso, Hidcote, and Munstead—to give you a good mix of color, form, and height.You can add to it once we see which kinds do best in your yard, and also which ones you like the most.Sound okay to you?”“Sure, whatever you think,” I said.Tess picked up a shovel, so I did, too.We started turning over the soil in an area in front of some bushes that Rosie said would give the plants winter protection from the wind as well as good southern exposure.I’d never once thought of my house in terms of direction, and suddenly I had both a clothesline and a garden facing south.Rosie stopped digging and leaned on her shovel.“The trick to taking care of lavender is not to overlove it.”“The trick to taking care of anything is not to overlove it,” Tess said.I had a sudden urge to write that down.“So true,” Rosie said.“Anyway, lavender doesn’t like a rich soil, so we’re going to go really easy on the chicken manure.Drainage is key, which means we’ll build up the bed and add sand, plus throw in some time-released lime to make the soil more alkaline.”“How do you know so much?” I asked.“How do you know so much about shoes?” Rosie asked.I dug my shovel in, and it barely made a dent in the packed soil.“Occupational hazard, I guess.”Rosie jumped on her shovel with both feet.“Well, mine is more an accident of birth.You grow up on a lavender farm, you learn more than you ever want to.”“Wait,” Tess said.“I don’t get it.I thought you were the new owner.”“I am.Well, I guess I’m the new old owner.My mother died, my father couldn’t keep up with things, so I was the dutiful daughter who stepped up.And dragged my family kicking and screaming with me.”I wondered what I would have done if my mother had wanted me to move in after my father died.I wondered what it meant that she hadn’t.Rosie stopped shoveling long enough to push some red curls out of her face.“It’s the last place I would have pictured myself at this point in my life, but what could I do?”Tess and I nodded sympathetically.“My husband is a contractor, and I do his landscape design, plus my own jobs, and the kids didn’t have to switch schools, so it was all doable, but…”“But that doesn’t make it easy,” Tess said.Rosie dug the shovel in again.“My parents were inseparable, and even when my mother started slipping into dementia, it was all about lavender for her.She stopped cleaning the house, and one day when my husband and I brought the kids to visit, we found she’d painted everything purple so the dirt wouldn’t show.The walls and the refrigerator, inside and out.Even the toilet seat.The paint wasn’t quite dry on that, and we all had purple rings around our butts for the next two weeks.”“Oh, your poor father,” Tess said.“How’s he doing now?”The garden was taking on a nice shape, kind of like a paisley at the edge of my yard.Tess started pulling clumps of grass and weeds out and shaking the dirt off them.“He’s doing okay,” Rosie said.“We moved him downstairs to the family room and put in a bathroom just for him.We had a family party to celebrate, and he spent the whole time giving bathroom tours.”“Well, that’s good,” Tess said.Rosie nodded.“It’s tough though.We had to think ahead.So we had them put a grab bar next to the toilet.We told him it’s a towel rack, so he wouldn’t get upset.They put in a thirty-six-inch doorway, big enough for a wheelchair, and he said, What in tarnation is that barn door for? So my husband said it was because they were out of small doors.”“Good thinking,” I said.Rosie leaned on the handle of her shovel again.“We put in a double shower, too.We told him it’s in case he has company.” She smiled.“I think he liked that one.”After Tess and Rosie left, for the first time in a long time, I picked up the phone and called my mother, instead of waiting for her to call me on Sunday.Day 1210,001 stepsROSIE AND TESS WERE STANDING IN MY DRIVEWAY WHEN I pushed my front door open.“Wait,” I said.I unlocked my car with a click and grabbed the shoes I’d exchanged for Rosie, plus the two purple pedometers.I’d completely forgotten about them yesterday.“Genius,” Tess said.“Pedometers are all a little bit different, so this way we’ll be on the same page with our mileage [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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