The Naked Gardener by L B Gschwandtner Read Free Book Online

fences? Oh, look at the hollyhocks. And the rambling rose over there.” She couldn’t stop pointing. Butterflies flitted among the flowers and birds sang cheerily from the trees.
    “Katelyn, what a wonderful world you’ve created. I never would have guessed this was here,” said Erica. She followed Hope and soon they parted, taking different paths to see the entire garden from vegetables to herbs to flowers and vines. “Oh, look. You do have some honeybees.” She pointed to a trumpet flower. “I wonder where they’re coming from.”
    “If this were my garden I’d never want to leave it,” said Hope.
    “Yes but we have to get going,” Erica reminded her. “The delivery, you know.”
    We left the garden. I latched the gate and we walked again among the Queen Anne’s Lace up toward the barn where they had parked. When we passed by the open barn Erica spotted our canoe stored upside down on a rack at the north side.
    “Whose canoe?”
    “Mine mainly. Maze is not so comfortable on the water yet. He prefers being airborne. I do a lot of canoeing and kayaking on the tidal creeks in Virginia. We brought this canoe up here last summer. So far we’ve only gone down the Trout River a little ways below the falls.”
    I led them through the Queen Anne’s lace path until we stood at the garden gate. I had an urge to talk about my naked gardening but Erica rattled on about this and that and finally said, “Well I’m glad we stopped by but we don’t want to keep you from your chores.”
    Hope had been watching me. At that moment I caught her eye. She was such a quiet person. She seemed so shy yet there was something intent about her also. I had the sense that there was a lot brewing beneath the surface with her. A lot she didn’t say out loud.
    “Is something troubling you?” she asked me and at the same time rested her fingers on Erica’s forearm as if to say “Wait a minute.”
    I bent over and picked up a rock that had wormed its way up through the soil and now sat balanced on top of a frost heave the spring thaw had left behind. I tossed it outside the garden and noticed a few more stones just starting to show through fissures where the ground had frozen, expanded and pushed upward.
    “There is something,” Hope prodded gently but before I could say anything, Erica spoke.
    “I used to canoe all the time. With Will and Matthew when he was little. We used to go to a camp on weekends on Lake Champlain.”
    “You never mentioned that,” Hope said. “Why did you stop?”
    “Matthew grew up. Will took up golf. I had nobody to go with I guess.” She looked at me as if to ask if I wanted to go canoeing with her. As if she was itching to do something that would take her away from her life, even if only for a day.
    Hope turned back to me but the moment had faded and I only ground my boot toe into the soft earth. The garden was coming along nicely. All my work would pay off soon in a bounty of vegetables and flowers. I noticed the wisteria vines had wound around and entwined themselves with the trumpet vines in a kind of strangling dance, each holding the other so tightly that it was now impossible to tell which you were looking at or where one started and the other stopped. The wisteria had long since bloomed but the trumpet flowers were budding out and some had already opened, their red orange flutes reaching upward toward the sun. A hummingbird flitted among them, buzzing, buzzing and then darting away in an impossible acrobatic motion so swift it was impossible to follow with your eyes.
    We wandered from the garden up the lacy path toward where they had parked. I almost asked if Erica had a loaf of bread to spare and then she offered me one as we walked and I thought how incredible to be so in synch and then buried the thought as Hope prattled about the chicken coop and the barn and the garden and how lovely everything was.
    “At the rectory no one’s paid much attention to the flowers and shrubs in