Here and Again Read Free Page A

gray tabby cat.
    Regard didn’t belong to the family. He was a stray that stayed. As Ginger gazed around, she found him crouched on top of one of many fence rails that were strewn on both sides of the drive. It was rough-hewn locust wood and would have been part of the snake-rail fence Jesse had planned on completing last time he was home. His duty, however, had taken him away just as he finished sinking the posts into the soil, so all lay exactly as he had left it ayear and, what? Nine months. It was forever since he had been gone.
    As she kissed at the cat, Ginger surveyed what winter had brought to the farm. The property was the half-moon end of a loop in the north fork of the Shenandoah River. To Ginger’s north and left was a wide, flat field that rolled down and away from the small rise of the house to a large stand of trees from which the snake-rail fence had been cut. A version of that same fence separated the horses’ corral from the rest of the cropland. Jesse had finished that before he left. Now the field was covered with snow, its furrows hidden beneath the smooth blanket of white and winter wheat, undisturbed all winter by horse or human.
    On Ginger’s right and south was a pond that used to feed the springhouse by way of a stream. In times past, when there was no such thing as a refrigerator, such a springhouse was used to keep food from spoiling. It was a mystery to the Smoots why the pond no longer fed the stream, but it hadn’t since the Civil War. So a small, dry streambed ran down to a copse of ash, hickory, and walnut trees. It was on this side Jesse had planted Ginger’s apple and pear orchard eleven years before when they came to spend their honeymoon on the farm. They hadn’t gone to Hawaii or Tahiti. Military people rarely find true rest anywhere but home, where they rarely are—or so Jesse had explained. The perfect honeymoon, therefore, was to be home together and home was the farm. Grandpa Henry had helped Jesse dig and plant for four days, getting the trees solidly set into the ground to help Ginger and her Northwest sensibilities find a root there, too. Ginger smiled as she watched Jesse in her mind’s eye carry a tin bucket of McIntosh over to her.
    “Make me a pie, woman,” she whispered to the barren branches of her winter orchard.
    Beyond the orchard and hidden behind the copse of ash, hickory, and walnut, the little streambed ran past the springhouse to the river and there Jesse had taught his children to swim and fish and find the magical, secret world of his own boyhood. He dreamed for nothing greater in life than for Henry, Bea, and Oliver to grow on this land and flow like this river. Though he was a soldier, the tender of his heart beat freely here, in his Shenandoah dream, with Ginger, his children, and his grandmother. He took it with him when he was deployed; he’d lock away his green, gentle heaven, keeping him connected to the subdued beauty and serenity of his valley home when in the omnipresent heat and violence of war’s fury.
    Ginger stood, listening to him tell her as much as he rested his head upon her breast the night before he last left. She sighed, her breath as white as the flat white sky above. If there was a sun up there, Ginger didn’t see it nor did she feel its heat. She could go into the house now to be warmed by the cup of coffee she knew Osbee had waiting for her. Instead, she turned toward the pond. Between the orchard and the copse of trees, a covered bridge stood over the streambed. A covered bridge over a dried-up stream in the middle of a forty-two-acre farm in a hairpin turn of the Shenandoah—what use was that? It was the first question Ginger had asked of Jesse when he had brought her to the farm to meet his grandparents. In answer, he’d explained to her that it was there so someone could put a historic marker on Interstate 81 calling attention to it and people would exit, drive five miles of windy roads to the Smoots’ farm, and give the