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“I’d have to think about it,” she evaded, moving past him again. Wild blackberries and morning glory twisted through the vines. Stands of non-native Canada thistle and baby-blue chicory grew tall as her waist. She batted them away with the back of her hand. “These non-natives need to go, though. Then, the key to keeping them gone is a healthy native community. The good stuff grows and crowds out the bad stuff.”
“How do we even begin? It’s overwhelming,” Harrison said.
Rowan came to an archway made by joined vines at the end of the trellised row. Before ducking out of the vineyard, she looked back at him and said, “One row at a time.”
A wild meadow stretched out before her. After the relative gloom of the overgrown vineyard, emerging into the meadowfelt like entering Oz. The morning was so bright and crystalline, she could almost smell the sunshine.
Native grasses with downy seed heads swayed, birds darted and feasted. Wildflowers, everywhere; heath asters as white as snowdrifts, and native bee balm like lavender-pink islands throughout the sea of grass. Milkweed pods burst with fleecy seeds, ready to fly. Bees were thick on native sunflowers, black-eyed Susans, and feathery goldenrod, their fuzzy butts industriously puttering, greedy for nectar.
Beyond the meadow, the Victorian spires of the greenhouse roof were like a dragon’s spine against a cloudless sky. She shielded her eyes against the sun glaring off a glass panel.
Rowan felt her body bend toward the sun like one of those wildflowers. She turned her face up to the sky and basked in the gentle heat, reveling in birdsong and the sibilant sound of the wind through the grasses.
This.
This was what she’d been missing. The past year of her dissertation work had been spent crunching numbers and writing her paper in her little cubicle lab office with the cold cinder block walls. And now, she was holing up in Temperance’s tidy apartment, with its cream-colored paint and ivory furniture and sterile air-conditioned air, hunched over her laptop until her temples ached from eyestrain. Utterly unable to summon the initiative to make the blinking cursor on her manuscript move.
Nature was her religion, her church. Her therapy, and her muse. The thing that grounded herandset her free. The songbirds had no agenda for her, and plants made no emotional demands.
She felt like a green thing herself, long denied the nourishment of the light.
This felt like home.
A crunch of boots on stony soil interrupted her reverie.Rowan turned and pinched hard across the bridge of her nose to stem sentimental tears hanging heavy behind her eyes. Her breath tripped over the lump in her throat when she tried to speak.
“This place,” she whispered.
Harrison gave her space. “I think you ecology types call it a meadow?”
She smiled and nudged a rock around with her foot.
“You wanna go to the greenhouse?” he asked.
AN OLD TRACTORpath cut through the meadow. It was badly overgrown on both sides, but still wide enough to pass through, and a much more direct route to the greenhouse than backtracking through the vineyard.
Harrison followed closely behind her, close enough that she heard how his breathing grew increasingly labored the deeper they delved. At the first bend in the path, Rowan heard his footfalls abruptly stop. She looked back to find him staring ashen-faced into the tall grasses alongside them.
“Coming?” she asked.
He shook his head once. Twice.
Rowan frowned. “Are you okay?”
Fresh sweat dotted his forehead and upper lip, and his chest rose and fell, rapid and shallow. He pressed two fingers to his neck, under his jaw. His eyes were round and bright as silver dollars, and he didn’t respond.
“Are you sick?” Rowan asked.
Harrison shook his head. “Spiders. They’re massive.”
In the grasses around them, huge yellow and black garden spiders hung suspended in glittering silk webs spanning several feet across. Rowan had noticed them as soon as she’d stepped onto the path. Having spent much of her academic life in environments like this, she’d been unbothered, but the abject terror in Harrison’s entire being gave her pause.
“Big, yes,” she said. “But not aggressive. Don’t grab one and squeeze, and you’ll be fine. You don’t plan to do that, do you?”
Harrison shook his head again. The spider closest to him was motionless, placidly waiting for a meal. By the way he looked at it, it might have been a flying cobra.
“Then you’re fine.” She turned sideways and gestured for him to follow. “Let’s go?”
“I—can’t,” he choked. “Can’t move. Can’t breathe.”
