Episode 2: Greening
Cate's garden thrives & the neighbor presents a mystery
Originally sent Friday before I headed out of town…not realizing the poll wasn’t working. Now it is…cast your vote below!
What follows is Part 2 of a short series of Choose Your Own Adventure fiction—where each chapter ends with a Reader Poll (open for 3 days after sending) to determine what happens next. Play along! None of this is planned out…I’ll discover along with you.
Part 2:
“So what are you planting?” Michael asked.
“Shh—!” Cate raised a finger. “Did you just hear something?”
Forks poised, they both paused and listened for a while. Ears tuning past the humming fridge, the laundry rolling in the other room; straining through the screen window framing the kitchen table, the slight breeze stirring the windchimes…
“What’d you hear?”
“I could swear I heard people talking outside.”
“Neighbors?”
Cate shook her head. “Kids.”
Box by box and drawer by drawer, Cate and Michael unpacked and spread out in their new place, as the calendar flitted past. Extending tendrils of themselves into every nook and corner, filling the space with warm living touches that gradually transformed it from house to home.
Like Michael’s cabinet-mounted spice rack, which opened and unfolded like something from the Millennium Falcon’s galley. His gleaming walnut knife block bristling with a college-semester’s worth of fine steel, representing forge masters from half the continents. He hung a sturdy live-edge bracket shelf for his stack of cookbooks…then he fired up the stove and breathed sizzling life into the reassembled pieces.
Cate put up new splendid curtains and found perfect spots for her myriad planters. Painted the cabinets and two of the rooms upstairs, sourced furniture and matching bathroom fixtures and other functional details. She hung their framed paintings and photos; many by her, but most picked up from various art-fair pros through the years .
And so the Clarences settled in, finally home.
Out in the yard, Cate’s garden flourished like nothing she’d ever seen. Like two plants growing from every start and seedling. Like thick healthy shoots and leaves everywhere, laden with buds swelling and bursting into bloom…busy with fat bumblebees and other pollinators sowing the ripeness that would become corn, beans, squash, and other fresh delectables.
“Unbelievable,” she showed Michael one afternoon. “We’re gonna get so much produce, we’ll have to give most of it away.”
“Can’t wait,” he said snapping off an early pea and munching it thoughtfully.
After work Cate would stay out late in the garden until the sun splashed down beyond the trees, refracting into fireflies and stars all around. Which conspired with the mosquitoes to drive her indoors at last.
Where she’d wolf down the incredible meals Michael put before her, and make the appropriate noises of praise & gratitude. Carrying on perfectly reasonable conversations and sometimes even more, at night in their bed—while the young plants in her garden cried out like a chorus running through her thoughts:
Let us rise, give us light, set us free!
But along with the fertile delight came a constant battle against new weeds—which Cate swore she watched sprout and grow one afternoon. If she skipped a day of weeding, she’d face hell the next afternoon. Two days left a tangle that might make her miss work. Three wasn’t something she was willing to risk.
“Still no fertilizer,” she told Michael over fresh-squeezed lemonade. “Someone must’ve had a really good garden there before.”
Next door the lawnmower switched off, bathing the scene in sudden silence.
Then the neighbor’s head appeared over the wooden fenceline. “You kids just bought this place,” he said by way of greeting. It wasn’t a question.
Cate and Michael nodded.
“That huckster realtor tell you what happened to the previous owners, why it went to county auction?”
The Clarences shook their heads.