Page 46 of Harvest Moon

26

Ridge

It was well past time for me to stop making a mess out of everything I touched. Sure, my life hadn’t gone exactly to plan, but whose did?

The only choices left to me were to sink into feeling sorry for myself, or dust my backside off and get to work. Considering that the Hills needed me, and Ford himself was a bit down in the dumps, it was that much easier to get to work.

Of course, I’d never been the fastest at getting around to anything, so it wasn’t until we were sitting over breakfast on Tuesday morning that I summoned up the courage to talk to Barbara and Henrik about the changes I wanted to make.

“When we were in town the other week,” I started, setting my fork and knife aside now that my plate was clean, “I talked to Isaac down at the grocery about things he’d like to see more of from local farmers. He mentioned this spring, with prom season coming up, it’d be good to have some flowers for corsages and the like.”

Henrik sniffed, and he raised his coffee cup, but his eyes were locked on me. Ford was still moving eggs around on his plate.

“Having some flowers around the house would be lovely,” Barbara said, patting my hand in a gesture that was fond, but not unlike the way you’d show approval to a kid who’d done something clever.

I was after more than that.

With a nod, I pushed on.

“Well, and I was thinking, if we’re going to try growing flowers—there’s a nice place over east of the farmhouse where we could put some raised beds, and it’d work real nice if we started a couple hives, you know, for bees. Help the pollinators along.”

While I’d been in school, some of my classmates had pushed a program putting bee hives on rooftop gardens in the city. It was a damn good idea, and given how we’d changed the ecosystem for about every animal we shared the planet with, it was high time we started looking for workarounds to help them out.

We wouldn’t get anywhere—wolves, humans, and farmers—if all the bees and butterflies disappeared. It wouldn’t matter how hard we worked the land if we threw the whole environment out of balance.

“Bees?” Henrik asked, a worried look on his face.

“Yeah. I mean, I’m more than happy to take care of them. I did a little beekeeping back in school—not a ton, but enough that I know where to start.”

Finally, Ford lifted his head and looked right at me. He gave a short nod. “Sounds like a good idea to me. And we’ll have honey too, right?”

I nodded. “Once they’re settled in, if the hives stay healthy.”

Barbara clapped her hands. “Well, that settles it. If you boys think it’s a good idea, I can’t wait to see how it goes. Everybody always says not to put your eggs in one basket. I think a little diversification will be good for the farm.”

“As long as no one expects me to go messing around with bees,” Henrik grumbled.

But all I needed from them was approval, and I couldn’t help the broad grin on my face when I got it. It was just a quick conversation over breakfast, it’d take months of coordinating before we got the hives set up for spring, but I’d gotten my way. Nobody’d laughed at me or brushed me off or told me I was getting too big for my britches.

And for the first time in a long time, I was riding the high of being able to do my job and do it well. Taken as a competent professional —even if that meant working with my hands all day—was enough to make the working hours fly right by me.

“Coming in?” Ford asked me when the sun started dipping toward the tree line. We’d been turning over soil all day, prepping fields to lay fallow for winter.

“I’ll be in in a few minutes.” For a second, I watched him go, leaning against my shovel, tucked into the dirt.

I dug my phone out of my back pocket. Today had been a good day—I’d said what I meant to say, and hadn’t been disappointed with the outcome. In fact, that evening, I was planning to collect resources, find some local people to get in touch with to help me set up a couple hives. We’d start slow, get the hives going strong, see how it went the first year.

I felt an awful lot of hope, and there was only one person I wanted to share that with.

I pulled Alexis’s number up on my phone and hit the “call” button. Over and over, the phone rang. He never did pick up, but when his sweet voice came on, telling me to leave a message and he’d get back to me in a snap, I smiled into the receiver.

“Hey, Lexis. I know we—we left this weekend on a weird note. I understand you might not want to talk to me right now, but... I figure I owe you some kind of explanation.”

I took a deep breath, worrying when this thing was going to cut me off. I’d never left a long message for anybody before.

“When I came back from school, my parents were—were selling the farm. It was rough, coming back with less than I had. Felt like I’d failed or something, but, well, now it seems like my bigger failure was not talking to you about it. So maybe if you’d call me back—”

Beep.

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