Cherry Wren's Arc

Chapter 2 of 6

The morning after she signed up, Cherry walked outside to look at her rental lot with new eyes. The small blue house sat squat on its concrete pad. The yard was a strip of patchy grass hemmed in by a fence. No room for a coop. No room for rows. She had a class on Saturday and nowhere to bring the skills home. She drove to the hardware store and loaded scrap wood into her trunk. By afternoon she was kneeling in the dirt, hammering together a lopsided raised bed. She filled it with bagged soil and tucked in starter seedlings — tomatoes, basil, two pepper plants she wasn't sure would survive. She stepped back and felt the smallness of it. One wooden box against the fence. Not a homestead. Not even close. The cream cottage with the rose roof she pictured at night, the wraparound porch, the trees — that place needed acres. This had inches. She almost cried. Then she didn't. She walked to the corner of the lot and dug up the little glass bottle with the pink ribbon. She carried it back and set it on the edge of the wooden box, where she could see it from the kitchen window. The garden was too small. She knew that. But it was real, and it was hers, and the seedlings were already in the ground. She couldn't put them back.