Donna Ball - At Home on Ladybug Farm

Table of Contents

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. Ive got it! she exclaimed. Ive 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 well 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 didnt know that.Lindsay and Bridget looked at Lori with new interest. Is that right? Bridget said.And Lindsay added, A boarding house?Lori nodded. Thats 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, its still a house full of women.

Also by Donna Ball

A YEAR ON LADYBUG FARM

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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 authors 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 friendshipFiction. 2. Shenandoah River Valley (Va. and W. Va.)Fiction.
3. FarmhousesConservation and restorationFiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A4545A95 2009
813.54dc22 2009019127

http://us.penguingroup.com

March Hares

Homes really are no more than the people who live in them.

NANCY REAGAN

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. Cicis 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 tookboth in terms of finances and energyto 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 godsendeven 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 housekeeperand Cicis twenty-year-old daughter Lori, who was herself a force of nature. The six-bedroom house, with maids 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 Lindsays words, slightly more fun than spending the winter with the Donner party.

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