Jane and Martin now only visit the farm. Brooke and Peter buy a truck and Luci starts school.
Jane and Martin stoped by often for a visit. They liked seeing the young couple and keeping up with the changes. They approved of everything, except, maybe, the large jacuzzi Peter put in the main bath. Brooke wanted to explain, but decided it could wait.
On nice days, Brooke took Peter’s car to town so there would be room to carry Jane, with a few of her friends, to the market; especially when the heirloom tomatoes were ripe or a new load of Freestone peaches came in.
More and more of the residents at Camp Care, the continuous care community Jane and Martin enjoyed, were eating organic fruits and vegetables, less animal protein, and doing exercises with names they always mispronounced.
There was even a lady chef at Camp Care who was teaching the women (and a few of the men) to make good choices for simple meals they could fix on their own.
Her last name was Adams, but Jane didn’t think she was kin. She wasn’t from around here and her degree was from the big chef school in Charlotte. All Adams’ women could cook, but they learned it at home, not off in a school. They’d have a chance to talk someday, Jane hoped.
Life at The Camp was different from what they knew on the farm. Jane now looked forward to her days full of visiting with friends, it’s more fun than chores, she said.
Martin was meeting new friends to go with the ones he’d “been knowin’” all his life.
He’d become a regular in the “Tinker’s Guild,” a group of men who got together to tinker with stuff that didn’t work – maybe a toaster or a lamp, or even some of the newer computers could be fixed by a smart tinkerer’s tinkering with ’em.
The tinkerers converted an old storage room: adding a few workbenches and florescent lights, plus tools from a nearby flea market.
The wives said the whole thing was a mess; the tinker’s needed to clean the place up, get a better system so they could know when a broken coffeemaker came in and when it was expected to go out.
One of the men said he always wrote the information on the big calendar over his bench but when the lady looked at his calendar she could see why her coffeemaker had gone missing. How could any tinkerer know what day it was with a woman like that looking him in his face?
It was a good thing the room didn’t have windows, she thought. Too bad she never came back for a closer look at the 1980 calendar from the old air compressor company in Chicago. It wasn’t just the pretty women, but the 40 year-old dates possibly responsible for her missing machine.
Back at Tall Clover Farms – a name we’ll get to in a bit – you would usually find everyone in the kitchen. Peter had been doing most of the cooking, what with his new range and other pricy cooking toys.
The big question was about Luci and school. It was only half days now but next year Luci would be at school all day.
Brooke thought home schooling would be better – and safer too she said.
“The schools in this county are great, Brooke. They’re a damn site better than those Catholic schools my parents made me go to in Cleveland. Luci will be fine, you’ll see. Besides, they hired a guard this year,” said Peter with a voice that woke the baby.
“Peter, Peter, Peter, don’t you do anything on that computer but watch cooking shows? Look at the news, there’s a school shooting every other day! Her pre-school could be next. There’re guns everywhere, Peter. They’re in the back windows of trucks…”
“Those aren’t to shoot pre-schoolers,” Peter interrupted.
“Maybe not, but you do know, don’t you, how it’s now legal to strap a pistol around your waist, like a wild west movie, without even getting a permit!”
She was hot.
“This state’s gone crazy since that new bunch of scoundrels took over. Open your eyes, Peter!”
Brooke took a deep breath, tilted her head to one side, and didn’t say another word.
After what seemed like forever, Peter finally spoke up.
“You’re right,” he said.
This wasn’t their first fight, nor was it the first time he’d seen her tilt her head like that. That tilt was Brooke’s way of saying, “There, I’ve said my piece, now deal with it.”
Like when she got the idea to start Barking Out Loud, or the time she insisted on only hiring full time employees.
Peter later said how he thought having Luci at home all day would be fun – like it was his idea all along.
So, these days, when Peter was working at his 36-inch Wolf range, Brooke was at the large Lazy Susan table, working with Luci on her lessons; while Pete, a name they still argued about, but not like schools, stacked his alphabet blocks or made a racket with his new wooden pound-a-peg game.
And, if they weren’t in the kitchen when people stopped by, they were most likely in the barn — although Jane had told Brooke it was looking less like a barn everyday, what with its two large bay windows in back, and so many of those new fancy transom windows installed in the roof to let in more light.
On the next Adams’ visit, Martin asked Peter why the place didn’t have a truck. “Every farm, at least in these parts, needs a truck. We always had one or two when we lived here.” said Martin, with an unusual holier-than-thou tone to his normally pleasant voice.
Martin was right, thought Peter, so he scoured Craigslist until he found one he liked. It was old, but didn’t have many miles. The ad said it would run forever, what with that engine and transmission combination. Plus it had four-wheel drive.
Peter arranged for a trailer to deliver the truck and it was soon in daily use. He’d take it out to run errands and explore – when he could get it away from Brooke.
One day, he was visiting the new fancy homes being built for folks to live in only a few weeks each year. He thought he’d get some ideas for projects he could do someday around the house.
“Pickups never need an invite to job sites, they just show up.” Peter said when Brooke asked how he could barge in like that.
It wasn’t long before he was visiting with the builder. He told him how he liked what he was doing (a boldfaced lie), but was puzzled by the scrap piles of wood around each home.
“My customers demand hard wood floors to show off their fine Oriental rugs,” said the builder, “and they only want the long pieces of expensive heartwood pine to boot; we just toss the short scraps in a pile and pay an old guy to haul ‘um off.”
Peter’s puzzlement now turned to anger. The wood was perfectly fine, just short – so the builder was paying good money to have it hauled off, probably to a dump. “Could I put some in my truck?” said Peter. “Sure, take all you want,” was the builder’s quick reply (thinking he wouldn’t need to pay the old guy as much this time).
Load after load showed up at Tall Clover Farms. Peter put the first loads around the shop and then, not to be wasteful, brought even more and started a pile on the side of the house where the washer and dryer had been. None of the scraps were the same, so when he started laying them out he found himself surrounded by a giant jigsaw puzzle, without the lid to the box.
“It’s a good thing I like puzzles,” thought Peter, as he put down furring strips over black felt paper and with the hardwood flooring nail gun he’d rented from Charlie at the store, fit the irregular pieces of pine together, one by one. Within a few days, the floor was ready to sand. Next he got Brooke to mix a few shades of stain and wiped it on the wood.
“This looks more like a chopping block than a fancy floor,” she said. But after studying it for a while she told Peter a floor like this would be perfect in the hall, and maybe his kitchen even.
Brooke wanted to help. She didn’t have any trouble with the jigsaw pieces but was hesitant with the gun.
Guns of any type were something Brooke didn’t like, other than the old shotgun she found in the attic. She’d used it to shoot out the light on the tall pole where the gravel road turned off to head up to the farm. Brooke had watched a documentary about how light pollution was the new worry, causing nature not to know when to sleep.
Brooke was just doing her part.