Page 5 of No Bed Of Roses

Levi gave himself a minute by taking another sip. The idea wasn’t terrible. A spark of something lit up inside him. “I don’t know a single thing about growing hops. Corn and wheat, but not hops.”

Marcus rolled his eyes. “You understand land and plants and growing and taking care of all that stuff. It’s a new challenge.”

Sean nodded. “A new opportunity.”

Troy smiled. “A new beginning.”

Huh. Challenge. Opportunity. Beginning. A fresh start. Maybe that’s what he’d been searching for and not finding. “I don’t have any land up here. I don’t even know if you can grow hops in Vermont. Hell, I don’t even know the growing zones up here.”

Troy laughed. “But you’re going to find out.”

Hell. He probably was.

Sean leaned in. “And we’ve got the land part covered. If it works for you, anyway.”

“You’ve got farmland?”

Troy nodded. “And a farmhouse. Sean and Branna are living there and renovating it.”

“And we’ve got a room ready and finished for you.”

“You in?” Troy held up his beer again.

Sean and Marcus did the same, all three watching him.

Was he in?

He thought about the pros and cons. Finally, he shrugged. “Maybe.” Then he lifted his beer and clinked with the others.

He didn’t fool any of them.

He was in.

Isla waved at her new friends as the truck pulled out of the driveway. She’d spent the night at Midnight Lake with Tansy and the rest of her crew. She wasn’t sure she had them all straight yet, but she’d met Graham of the ready-to-go meals and his partner Aisling, an amazing carpenter.

They’d helped her scour the buildings on the lodge’s property for old windows and wood Isla could use. Eventually, she wanted to build several greenhouses, but the first would be her practice.

Like Tansy, Isla wanted to do as little environmental damage as possible. Reusing was good for the world and good for the budget. These greenhouses wouldn’t use plastic. She was going to reuse old windows and doors instead.

To get started, she had a stack of wood, a few doors, and several stacks of windows. Aisling and Graham had offered to stay to help, but Isla had waved them off. She was in the planning stages and would rather save her requests for help when she was neck-deep in building because that was something she’d never done before.

She’d looked up a bunch of websites, but now she had materials, and she could get more serious about making an actual plan. While they’d been searching for materials in the sawmill and the other buildings on Tansy’s amazing property, Aisling had given her a ton of suggestions to help her.

Isla knew there wasn’t any rush. Tansy hadn’t invested in this property with her to earn a profit. Her friend knew most of Isla’s ideas and experiments were long-term ones with the aim of feeding the hungry around the world and eventually in space. That didn’t happen quickly, and none of her experiments guaranteed success. Science was more often about failure and learning than it was about success. Failures helped refine the process and eliminate dead ends.

Still, she wanted to jump in immediately and get started. She wanted to make this land feel like hers.

The first order of business was to spread out the windows and doors to find out what pieces would fit together to make a rectangular wall. She needed two sets of matching sizes to make the four walls. Probably more challenging than it sounded, with all of her materials being different sizes.

A large plot for a vegetable garden sat directly behind the cottage. Behind that, the land was relatively flat and would work for at least her first greenhouse, possibly two or three. The barn was behind that, off to the right-hand side of the property. Behind it was more land she could use further down the road.

Isla lifted the first window off the stack and brought it over to the flat area. This window was about three feet wide and at least five feet tall. If there was a matching one, it could fit above. That would give her ten feet of height. Plus, the wood she’d need to make the frame along the top and the bottom. Maybe that was too tall. She wanted to do most of the work herself.

An hour later, Isla had windows and doors spread all over the yard, and she was no closer to a plan than she had been at the beginning.

While she had a logical brain that excelled at science, her visual-spatial sense had never been strong. She struggled to picture the layout as a finished project and couldn’t picture at all how to complete the task.

The videos she watched said to have someone good at math figure out the layout. Super helpful. She’d rearranged the windows dozens of times and hadn’t found a method that worked.

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