Everett
One Year Later…
It's May and the apple tree is blooming.
It does this every year for five days, sometimes six, and then the petals come down and the fruit sets and it's over until the following spring.
I've watched it every year since I've been here and I've never gotten tired of it.
This year I've been watching the buds for two weeks, tracking their progress the way I track everything I'm waiting on.
Burl is under that tree.
We buried him in November, the ground still soft, on a grey afternoon after the last of the leaves had come down.
It was quiet and it didn't take long and we didn't say much and that was right.
He'd had a good last year — the best year of his life, I think, because Sloane was in it and Sloane had a particular talent for sitting on the porch floor at dog level and talking about basil.
He went the way good animals go: on his blanket, in the morning, ready. I was beside him. She was too.
The apple tree will bloom over him this week and I'm going to take her out there when it does.
She's in the kitchen.
I can hear her from the bean rows on a call, her voice carrying through the open window, the particular rhythm she has in work mode: efficient, warm, slightly faster than the rest of the time.
The farm fresh subscription box operation has been doing well and she's been approached by a farm two towns over about sourcing, which she's thinking about with the focused careful attention she gives to things she wants to do well.
I work through the row and listen to her and think about what this place sounded like before.
It's different now. She's in every corner of this place even when she's not in the room.
Her boots by the door. The notes she leaves on the kitchen windowsill.
The particular order she puts the jars back in after she makes the box inserts, different from mine, which I stopped correcting in October because her order has its own logic and I've come around to it.
The crib is in the workshop. White oak, joinery nearly done, and Fig has been sleeping in it every night since I set up the frame. I haven't discouraged this. Fig will do what Fig does.
Frost, our puppy, comes barrelling across the yard and hits my legs at full speed and bounces off, which is his standard greeting. He's enormous — bigger than Burl ever was at four months — and still in the phase where his own body surprises him on a regular basis.
The porch steps are his particular nemesis.
He goes up fine and then stands at the top and looks down and makes a decision and the decision is always wrong.
He sits at the bottom afterward with an expression of pure betrayal, as if gravity has specifically targeted him, and then does it again an hour later.
Burl's blanket is still out there. Frost sleeps on it.
This seems right to me.
Sloane appears in the kitchen doorway and leans on the porch rail with her phone in her pocket, looking at the garden. I watched her fully adjust to rural life over the summer. It's one of my favourite things in a life that has a lot of them.
Her hand goes to her stomach where her pregnancy is just starting to show.
The pregnancy test was six weeks ago, but I still play the memory over in my mind often. She came out of the bathroom and stood at the garden gate with a particular look on her face and I put down the trowel and went to her. She didn't say anything. She handed me the test.
I looked at it for a while.
Then I looked at her.
We stood in the garden and the bees worked the borage. It was an ordinary morning in every way except that it was the best morning I'd had since she drove down that gravel road for the first time.
Frost falls down the steps. He sits at the bottom. He looks at his feet.
Sloane turns from the rail. "Third time."
"Fourth," I say. "You missed the seven o'clock attempt."
"Was it impressive?"
"He cleared the bottom two entirely."
She laughs. "Progress."
She comes down the steps and through the garden gate and walks to where I am in the beans and stands beside me and looks at the apple tree at the property's edge, the white blossoms just opening in the morning light.
"Is that?" she starts.
"Yeah," I say. "It's starting."
She looks at it for a long moment with tears softly gathering at the corner of her eyes.
She takes my hand.
We stand in the bean row in the May morning and look at the apple tree coming into bloom, and Frost is at the fence line investigating something with total commitment, and Fig is on the porch rail watching all of us with ancient, half-closed eyes.
Despite all my gruff resistance, this woman is standing beside me with her hand in mine and her other hand at her stomach, and the farm is exactly what it's always been and completely different and both of those things are true. And I wouldn’t change a thing.
Summer Heat in Silver Ridge continues with Book 5: Hidden by the Wild Mountain Man. Click here to read Nyla & Dawson’s story.