I
Ruth Savage, the school psychologist, leaned back in her chair and studied the shrimpy girl with the lantern jaw and unruly mop of dark hair on the far side of the desk. "Your grandmother died."
Laurel Evers dark eyes focused on the moss-colored tendrils of a spider plant which reached almost to the floor. The teen, whose lips were frozen in a muted smile, affected an outmoded, hippy look with baggy, mannish corduroys and a plaid, flannel shirt. "She wasn't the easiest person to get along with."
Out in the hallway the bell clattered shrilly and a flurry of students scurried off to class. "You weren't nearly so tactful, when your history teacher, Mr. Peterson, offered his condolences," the school psychologist noted.
The sixteen year-old didn't seem the least bit contrite. Rather, she sat with a vinegary expression staring at her raggedy fingernails. “I told him that granny was a crumby, two-bit drunk and the world would be a better place without her." The words carried no rancor. Laurel was simply stating indisputable facts. Her paternal grandmother died. The woman wasn't particularly honorable and nobody mourned.
My granny was a crumby, two-bit drunk. The crudeness of the remark was compounded by the fact that Laurel blurted it in front of the entire class, setting off a stink bomb of hoots, jeers and bawdy encouragement. "Granny Evers had four husbands and cheated on all of them. She'd been arrested for shoplifting, driving an unregistered car, check and welfare fraud. Three of her four sons committed crimes and went to prison." Before Doctor Savage could cobble together a response, a guttural sound resembling a vulgar epithet welled up in her throat. "At least once a week, my father called her a crumby two-bit drunk in front of in the whole, goddamn family."
Ruth blanched. "And what did your grandmother do?"
Laurel leered at the psychologist then averted her eyes. "Laughed like a freakin' hyena." There was no hint of animosity in the girl's voice. That's just the way it was. The Evers clan was like something out of the sub-cultural backwoods of Appalachia where family kept their own counsel and the filth-encrusted laundry piled high as the treetops.
"Mr. Peterson’s demanding a formal apology."
"I only told him the hard, cold truth."
"What if he calls your parents in for a conference?"
"Then I sure hope he's got medical coverage," The girl sniggered mirthlessly. "My dad's a vicious brute. He’s been arrested more times than you've got fingers and toes. Most recently he did a six-month stint at the ACI lockup for manhandling my mother." Laurel cracked her knuckles and raised her eyes. "I ain’t hanging around here any longer than I have to. I read a book this winter and it gave me ideas."
Again, Ruth was struck by the girl's blasé tone. "What book?"
"This one." She pulled a thin paperback from the backpack resting at her feet and handed it to the psychologist. The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett - Ruth lay the book aside on the desk. "It’s about a bunch of hayseeds from Maine," Laurel clarified. "It's real peaceful up there. None of this," she waved her thin hands desperately trying to organize her thoughts, "god-awful crap." Laurel pulled her chair closer and leaned forward over the desk. "The locals live off the land… hunt, fish, pick wild berries through the summer. It's so much nicer... like some modern-day Garden of Eden!"
"You see, I got this plan." Again, the girl reached down into her backpack and withdrew a motorist's map of Maine, which she unfurled across the psychologist's desk. "My folks are dead broke, and I got no interest in college. This spring, I'll sneak down to the bus station in Providence and buy a one-way ticket to Bangor… scrounge around for temporary lodging and look for work." Laurel ran her forefinger deftly over the surface of the map. "If nothing materialized, I'll head further north to Millinocket, maybe cut across to Sugarloaf or Moosehead Lake." The young girl even talked of traveling further north to the chilly Allagash Wilderness sandwiched between New Brunswick and Quebec. It was a grand adventure – Louis and Clark without the benefit of the Shoshone Indian guide, Sakakawea.
Ten minutes later, despite the psychologist's best efforts, there was no talking Laurel Evers out of her great escape. Once school was finished, the five-foot, black eyed pixie was heading north, every logical, coherent, reasonable and prudent argument to the contrary be damned!
Only now did Ruth crack open the glossy book cover and glance at the title page. "This novel's over a hundred years old," the psychologist protested. "The rustic way of life you described is all but gone now."
Laurel thought a moment. "Maybe it's more a state of mind than a clump of wild pennyroyal or scraggily firs."
Realizing that they had drifted off-topic, Dr. Savage threw the book aside. "If you don't apologize to Mr. Peterson," she repeated, "he'll call home and make a royal stink."
Laurel screwed her face up in disgust. "And my father's liable to crack his ugly skull." A morbidly-obese, freckle-faced girl stuck her head in the door with a note. Dr. Savage scribbled a message and sent the girl on her way. "Okay, I'll apologize, but just this once." Laurel folded her map with meticulous care and retreated to the threshold. "So what's my diagnosis?"
"I don't follow you," Dr. Savage replied.
"Adjustment counselors pick people's brains for a living. What's your verdict?"
Rut Savage possessed a bad habit, bordering on fatal flaw: feeling threatened or out of her element, the psychologist fell back on sardonic humor. The caustic tendency had cost her more than one friendship and alienated several teachers, who misconstrued her irreverent wit.
"Helene Deutsch 'as if' personality." Ruth blurted with clinical detachment.
The petite girl's eyebrows danced skyward and she jutted her lips in a questioning way. "A famous, Freudian psychiatrist," Ruth clarified, "Helene Deutsch, once treated a woman who assumed the beliefs and mindset of people she only recently met." For the first time since arriving in the psychologist's office, a look of vulnerability overspread the girl's limpid, brown eyes. "Needless-to-say, I'm pulling your leg," Dr. Savage continued affecting a gentler tone. "You’re a sweet kid going through a rough stint at home. I'm just trying to dissuade you from acting on an impulse and making a bad situation worse."
"But there really was such a person?"
"Yes, it became a landmark case," Ruth replied. "Pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia - it's just another way of saying that someone, who appears relatively normal, is nuttier than a fruitcake."
* * * * *
After third period the same grotesquely overweight girl reappeared with another note from Mr. Peterson, the history teacher. Problem resolved. Thanks loads! Still later in the day, Laurel Evers materialized in the psychologist's open doorway. “About that whatchamacallit, weirdo condition you described earlier... were you pulling my leg?”
Dr. Savage, who was writing up a report, was broadsided by a wave of self-loathing. "The psychiatric condition is real enough, but there's nothing 'as if' about you." Ruth came out from behind the desk and grabbed the girl by both wrists. "Helene Deutsch… it was a regrettable, dim-witted joke meant to drive home a point and nothing more."
Pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia. What Ruth neglected to mention, as Laurel vanished down the empty hallway, was a prevalent theory written up in several respected journals that Ms Deutsch may herself have been just such an emotionally disingenuous anomaly. The bulk of the psychiatrist's research, if it could be described as such, reflected the woman's own emotional inadequacies and frigid, 'as-if' tendencies. As Ruth was getting ready to leave the office, she spied a slim volume jutting out from under a stack of Stanford-Binet IQ tests. Slipping the Sarah Orne Jewett book into her briefcase, she headed for the parking lot.
* * * * *
The Country of the Pointed Firs chronicled the adventures of a backwoods matriarch, Elmira Todd, who concocted herbal remedies and let out rooms to earn enough money to support her rural, subsistence-level existence. The old lady tramped about the rocky, Maine wilderness collecting wildflowers, stems and roots. In one chapter toward the middle of the book, she took a boat trip to visit with a reclusive, agoraphobic brother. It was a hardscrabble existence in which people meandered about in horse-drawn wagons, fished, grew their own potato crops and made throat lozenges from locally-grown spearmint boiled in metal cauldrons over the stove. Women braided floor mats from swamp-grown rushes, and even fashioned sandals from those very same pliable plants. The Civil War was a recent memory not some moldy, historical trivia and neighbors were more 'civil' or at least it seemed that way.
Laurel Evers had a yen to go exploring - backwards to the tail end of the previous century not forward into a mechanistic future. Reading a book by some quaint, nineteenth-century writer, the vulnerable girl went haywire, seizing upon the author's credo as a personal message of salvation. When Laurel handed Ruth the dog-eared paperback, she did so with both hands cupped together, the way devout Catholics accepted the host during Holy Communion. Again, as she smoothed the map of Maine across the psychologist's desk, it was with the veneration one accorded a sacred talisman.
Through the spring Ruth kept an eye out for Laurel Evers. She looked for her in the school cafeteria during lunchtime, at holiday assemblies and in the bustling corridors. One day in late May, she caught sight of a stumpy, dark-haired girl sitting in the bleachers over by the track field. "I thought that was you." Ruth climbed to the topmost row and sat down. Far below on the field, a sprinter knelt down in set position at the starting block. "No more problems with Mr. Peterson?"
Laurel shrugged and cracked a tepid smile. "He's a horse's ass."
"Still planning your great escape?"
"Second week in July… already bought my ticket."
Ruth felt a dusky misery descend on her heart. "Why so soon?"
Laurel leaned back on her elbows raising her pale face to the stingy, spring warmth. "Around the holidays, my father beat up some rummy in a Central Falls barroom. He was on parole for a previous offense, so the judge revoked bail and sent him back to prison. I want to be long gone before that jerk leaves lockup."
"I keep forgetting to give you this." Ruth handed the girl the Sarah Orne Jewett book. "If you have trouble finding work in Bangor, there's a huge tourist industry along the coast. I'm sure you could find a job in Old Orchard Beach, Scarborough or Booth Bay Harbor."
On the track, the runner darted out of the starting block at lightning speed but pulled up after thirty feet and went back to try again. Further up the field, a black youth was leaping hurdles. Laurel flipped The Country of the Pointed Firs over in her hands and studied the cover absently. "How did you like it?"
"At first," Ruth said, "I found the book a bit dry, but after a while the characters sort of got under my skin."
“Think there are any Elmira Todds still poking around in the backcountry?”
The fictitious Elmira Todd wandered about the remote countryside collecting medicinal herbs – both wild and tended - that she boiled, chopped, grounded with a mortar and pestle for poultices, teas and medicinal salves. The bulky, rheumatic woman favored yarrow, sweet-brier, balm, sage and borage. There was mint, wormwood and wild thyme that, when accidentally trod upon, made its fragrant presence known.
Think there are any Elmira Todds still poking around in the backcountry? Ruth considered the question. The imaginary Elmira Todd was long dead, just like the author who created her. But a few of her progeny were sure to be wandering the back woods of Maine in search of the rare lobelia and elecampane for soothing syrups and elixirs.
"You're sure to rub shoulders with one or another of her great grandchildren," Ruth observed.
"I don't need much to be happy… just calm and quiet, that's all." A dogged wistfulness overspread the black eyes; a gritty obstinacy played out about the supple corners of the stunted girl's lips. "I'll send a postcard once I'm settled."
"Yes, I'd appreciate that."
Laurel Evers had been gone from the bleachers a good five minutes before Dr. Savage noticed the wetness on her cheeks and raised her glistening eyes to a perfectly sunny, spring day. Back on the field the sprinter was rearranging his limbs in the starting block. The weight of his body resting on arched fingertips, the arms hung almost vertical, buttocks angled a good six inches above the neck. It was a sublime balancing act.
II
A month and three weeks later, Laurel stood behind the counter at the Majestic Diner in Scarborough, Maine. At seven-thirty in the morning business was picking up nicely. Laurel had just cashed out a table of lobstermen on their way out to the marina. Mrs. Davidson, an elderly widow who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and favored a three-pronged cane, was nursing her poached egg and hash browns over by the picture window.
“You still hunkered down in that flophouse near the fire station?” Amber Flynn, the owner of the diner, edged up beside the young girl. The chubby brunette reeked of an odd mix of maple-cured sausages, fresh-brewed coffee and lilac body lotion.
“It’s a rooming house, and I’m perfectly happy there.”
Amber grunted a marginally incoherent objection. “Place caters to transients and chronic alcoholics.”
Laurel considered the remark briefly. “Which is probably why I feel right at home.”
When the Greyhound bus rumbled out of the station two months earlier heading north, Laurel breathed a huge sigh of relief and vowed never to look over her shoulder. Her parents had no idea where she had gone. The sixteen year-old girl had turned the page, gone off to rewrite the uncensored script of her new life. On the bedroom mirror she tacked a note – not so much a note as a declaration of spiritual sovereignty: Goodbye. Gone to a new life. Laurel.
She intentionally left out any hint of sentiment. Love, compassion, common decency – there had never been anything even vaguely resembling those hackneyed emotions. Why give truth to a bold-faced lie. Those seven meager words encapsulated in a pair of tidy sentences summarized everything that needed to be said.
“You’re a funny one!” Amber cackled good-naturedly. She lowered her voice several decibels. “If you’re ever looking for a reasonably nice place to live, the widow Davidson is renting out a room in her cottage, since her daughter married and moved to Tucson.” Amber nodded her head as though to confirm the efficacy of what she was saying. “She ain’t asking much and the neighborhoods respectable.”
“Not interested,” Laurel returned gruffly and went of to tend to a family of five that settled into a booth near the water cooler.
Later that night back at the rooming house, Laurel collapsed on the spongy mattress. Laurel kept to herself, preferring to take her meals at the restaurant. She had a hot plate for coffee and a claustrophobically narrow shower stall that spit tepid water when the boiler functioned. Out in the hallway several residents were arguing, the conversation virtually unintelligible. They sounded stupid, drunk and clueless. An angry accusation was followed by a barrage of foul language as a pair of heavy boots retreated toward the dusty stairwell. Amber’s original assessment was accurate. It was a seedy flophouse, but nobody bothered her and for the first time in her stultified life she felt totally at peace – unencumbered.
The herb gatherers of nineteenth century Maine – she hadn’t met anyone quite like the protagonist in the Sarah Orne Jewett novel, but the Majestic Diner was a sanctuary, a safe haven where nobody questioned her pedigree, her unsavory origins. The toxic waste dump of her childhood and formative years was dead and buried.
* * * * *
Amber’s husband, dead five years now, originally started the business. When he passed away from a stroke, his son, Wally, returned to cook and manage the kitchen. Wally, tall and dark-haired with a Red Sox baseball cap flipped so that the visor hung down the nape of his neck, was an enigma. He seldom spoke and, on the rare occasions he opened his mouth, preferred monosyllables to simple sentences.
“Don’t mind Wally,” Amber counseled. “His father’s death hit him pretty hard. The boy… he’s painfully shy around women… doesn’t know what to say. Small talk was never his strong suit.”
“What’s with the clipboard?” Laurel parried the conversation elsewhere. A small clipboard hung from a sixteen-penny nail pounded into the wall near the grill. Every so often Wally stopped what he was doing to jot something down with a stubby pencil. He never lingered, simply scribbled a word or two and turned his attention back to the food sizzling on the hot grille.
“Wally taught English literature for a few years… wanted to eventually be a novelist.” She sighed and blinked the moisture from her eyes. “Now he fritters his free time away writing short stories.” Amber repositioned a set of salt and pepper shaker in the middle of a table. “Sometimes when he’s cooking up orders, a clever word or idea flits into his brain and he pauses just long enough to make a note so he won’t forget to include it in the finished piece.”
Amber’s features brightened as she poked Laurel playfully in the ribs. “Wally… he’s always searching for the mot juste.”
“Moe what?”
“It’s a French term… the exactly right word.”
A tongue tied author – it didn’t make a shred of sense! Or did it? Laurel had a cousin on her mother’s side of the family, a gifted jazz singer, who, when she wasn’t belting out lyrics, stuttered and stammered horribly.
Just the other day, Laurel was waiting for an order browning nicely on the grill. “Ever heard of Sarah Orne Jewett?”
Wally’s lips curled in a reverential grin. “Just about the greatest story writer to ever emerge from the backwoods of Central Maine.”
Laurel pointed at the clipboard hanging at a cockeyed angle alongside the grille. “Your mother told me about your writing.”
“I’m just a hack… an amateur.”
* * * * *
Thursday a resident of the rooming house cracked a beer bottle over his girlfriend’s head. The police carted the assailant off to jail and transported the injured woman to the hospital. When the victim died, the charges were upgraded to manslaughter.
“I gotta get the hell out of where I’m living,” Laurel confided to Amber. “That old lady with the false teeth and gnarly fingers still looking to rent?”
Laurel moved into the widow Davidson’s house the following Monday. The elderly woman cleared the middle shelf in the refrigerator. “You can store perishables here,” she spoke in a crotchety monotone. Due to chronic pain, she tended to be a bit abrupt but was reasonable in most respects. “I always bathe in the early afternoon. You’re free to shower anytime after the evening meal.” She tapped a withered cheek with her swollen finger. “As the weather becomes chillier next month, I’ll set out extra blankets, but you should be comfy for now.”
When the widow finally retreated to her own room, Laurel surveyed her new digs. The twin bed seemed rather narrow. The mattress was firm and the maple bureau spacious enough to hold her meager wardrobe twice over.
* * * * *
“That older man over by the door nursing the bowl of oatmeal is Vladimir.” Megan gestured with her eyes. An angular man with bushy gray hair and walrus moustache, he was always polite, if somewhat difficult to understand because of his garbled speech and odd inflections. The man’s clothes were tastefully clean but dowdy.
“His English isn’t so good,” Laurel observed.
“Vladimir’s a recent transplant from the Soviet Union.” As Amber explained it, Vladimir worked as a journalist for Pravda, the state-run Soviet newspaper, at the time the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. The newspaper sent him to cover the occupation but, when Vladimir refused to write propaganda favorable of the Russian troops, the government sacked him, brought the man home in disgrace and banned him from ever working in the print media.
Outside the gray sky began spitting rain through streaks of brilliant sunshine – a late-summer sun shower. “So what did the Russian do when he couldn’t work as a journalist anymore?”
“Drove taxis.”
“For tips and minimum wage.” Laurel considered the elderly man’s professional fall from grace. “Sort of like being demoted from head chef at a gourmet restaurant to dishwasher.”
Five minutes later when Laurel cleared the table and brought the Russian his bill, he laid the money to one side on the table. “Is for you… teep.” He pointed at a pile of loose change heaped near the sugar bowl.
“Thanks.” Laurel felt a lump in her throat growing fiercer by the moment.
Vladimir, the former Pravda journalist who refused to write sappy propaganda praising the virtues of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and ended up driving cab for twenty years, smiled broadly, displaying a mouthful of gold-capped teeth. “You gooot gairl… I like much.” He sauntered out the door into the warm rain.
When he was gone, Megan said, “You didn’t happen to notice the sweater he was wearing.”
“The pale green one with the funny buttons?”
After loosing his job, the man lived hand-to-mouth. He had to satisfy immediate needs. There was never any money left over for future plans. Many Russians were in a similar bind. You owned a good sweater and an everyday sweater. You wore the good sweater only on special occasions. When the old sweater eventually wore out and fell to pieces, you bought a replacement and the previous ‘new’ sweater became the old sweater.
Amber seldom talked so freely. Sensing a hidden agenda, Laurel was beginning to feel uncomfortable. “And why are you telling me all this?”
The middle-aged woman disappeared into the supply room and emerged with a thirty-gallon, black garbage bag. The unwieldy bag was so heavy she could just barely lift it. “My niece, Veronica, married and moved away. She left these perfectly nice clothes behind. My sister was going to donate them to the Salvation Army, but I told her I had a better use for them.”
“I ain’t no beggar,” Laurel hissed.
“Neither was Vladimir when he lost his job.” She plucked a pair of designer jeans from the top of the pile. “My niece was your size… petite, all skin and bones, so they should fit nicely.”
Laurel rubbed the wetness from her cheek with the heel of a hand. “Thanks,” she whispered. “Thank you so much!”
“Veronica had a nasty vice,” Amber chuckled. “She was an incorrigible shopaholic… a regular fashionista. I ignored the bling-bling and garish crap… hand-picked the more modest pieces that I thought you might prefer.” Amber reached out and pulled the girl close. “Six months you been working here. You’re more like family than coworker.”
* * * * *
Around two in the afternoon the lunch crowd subsided followed by a brief lull. Laurel retreated to the kitchen, where Wally was bent over the prep table mashing a stick of softened butter into a pulpy mass. Slicing a lemon in half, he squeezed the tart juice into the metal bowl before reaching for a moss green herb on a foot-long stem. Inverting the sprig, he ran a taut thumb and index finger along the length of the plant and the needle-like leaves peeled away in a heap.
“Tarragon,” Wally announced in typical close-lipped fashion. He bunched the leaves together and minced them, chopping in rapid-fire strokes until all that remained left was a powdery mound of green. Mixing the herb into the butter, he added a dash of salt and pepper.
“Tarragon butter!” Holding the concoction under her nose, the short-order cook spooned a small dab onto the girl’s tongue.
“Tastes bittersweet… like anise with a spicy kick.” She rolled the butter over her tongue before swallowing. “And what do you do with tarragon butter?”
“Cook with it… steak, fish, whatever.”
* * * * *
Mrs. Davidson’s cottage was three streets down from the public beach. On her days off from the diner, Laurel walked the beach. Armed with a birding book, Feathered Friends of Coastal Maine, that she found at a kiosk on the boardwalk in Old Orchard, she began to familiarize herself with the indigenous population.
There were terns – common, arctic and roseate. They laid one to three eggs in shallow depressions in the ground and frequently used debris that washed ashore to build nests. Razorbills and guillemots were ‘alcids – marine birds that spent the majority of the year at sea, only coming ashore to nest.
And seagulls were not just seagulls. There were great black-backed, herring and laughing gulls. All three species built their nests on the ground. The great black-backed were the largest gulls and could live upwards of twenty years. The herrings were the most common and could survive ten years longer than the great blackbackeds.
As she walked the beach, Laurel poked at the remains of a dried up horseshoe crab, examined a gelatinous jellyfish and picked over some ornate shells. Directly ahead a family of French Canadians had pitched a garish beach umbrella close by the shoreline. The children, two adolescent boys and a younger girl, were building sand castles. They laughed and bantered back in forth in an odd polyglot of French and English. All was right in the world. A comforting thought nudged her mellow awareness – a century earlier, Almira Todd, the heroine of The Country of the Pointed Firs, may have strolled these same beaches when she wasn’t gathering wildflowers and medicinal plants or brewing up traditional herbal remedies.
* * * * *
“Ever finish that story?” Laurel gestured with a flick of her eyes toward the clipboard.
“A month ago.” Wally slid a spatula under a pair of eggs simmering on the grill and expertly flipped them upside-down. “Nine thousand words… a little under twenty pages.”
“And?”
“Sent it off to the Hudson Review, a literary magazine in New York.” He transferred the eggs onto a plate, added a scoop of hash browns along with four strips of bacon. In response to Laurel’s curious expression, he added, “Got the rejection letter earlier this week.”
“Thanks but no thanks.”
“Unsolicited manuscripts don’t get much serious consideration.” Wally slathered butter on several slices of Italian toast and handed the plate to Laurel. “Nine thousand words and all I merit is a form letter the size of a postage stamp.”
“So what do you do?”
“Keep plugging away.”
Later that afternoon before leaving, Laurel told Amber, “That literary magazine rejected Wally’s story.”
Amber blew out her cheeks in an attitude of despair. “My son… he writes and writes and writes and writes. He just sits at his desk with a number two, Ticonderoga pencil and bucket-loads of words pour from his soul.” “Unfortunately, when it comes to small talk… shooting the breeze, he ain’t nearly so gifted.”
The restaurant owner paused and glanced at Laurel, a conspiratorial gesture, drawing the girl into the woman’s circular logic. On rare occasion, Amber could be downright crude, choosing her mode of expression with the barbaric imprecision of a battering ram. “This is how I see it,” she cut to the chase. “You and my son… you both got issues. Since his father’s death, Wally’s all balled up in his emotions.” A steely undertone suddenly crept into her voice. “And you ain’t much better.”
“Excuse me?”
“With you, family’s a four-letter word.” “Just for the record,” she continued her wrecking ball approach, “if it’s meant to be, I wouldn’t mind having you as a daughter-in-law.”
* * * * *
One day in late November, Laurel arrived early for work. “What are you doing?”
Wally was in the kitchen with a ten-inch clay pot and bag of potting soil. The cook spread a thick layer of the dark medium almost to the lip of the pot then sprinkled a smattering of tiny seeds across the surface. “Rosemary… I’m growing my own herbs to use in the recipes,” he explained without bothering to raise his head. When he was satisfied with the arrangement, he sprinkled a paper-thin covering of the soil over the seeds. Only now did he look up at the waitress. “Isn’t that my Cousin Veronica’s blouse?”
Laurel’s malleable features went through a series of disparate permutations before settling on a self-conscious smirk. “A woman with excellent taste.”
“Now things get interesting.” Reaching for a plastic spray bottle, Wally misted the surface until the soil was drenched and spread a sheet of transparent cellophane over the top of the clay pot, creating a transparent lid, which he fixed in place with a rubber band.
“What’s with the plastic?”
“Helps retain moisture and heat soaked up from sunlight.” He cleared his throat. “Now we wait.”
“How long?”
“The seeds should germinate in about a month, give or take a few weeks. He ogled his handiwork. “Probably won’t be ready to harvest herbs until sometime next year.”
“But winter’s coming.”
Wally placed the pot on the window sill. “I’ll put the rosemary outside once the seeds sprout and bring it back indoors over the harsh winter months.”
“What