Their husbands were gone, their families grown, and the future stretched
before them like an unfulfilled promise.  Cici, Bridget and Lindsay had
always dreamed of doing more with their lives, and suddenly they realized
that they could do together what they never would have had the courage to do
separately. Leaving their familiar lives and the comfortable suburbs behind,
they bought a tumbled-down mansion in the country and began to restore it
board by board; rebuilding in the process nothing less important than their
own dreams.

Read how it all began in A Year on Ladybug Farm,available in March, 2009
from Berkley Books.  Meanwhile, sit back, listen to the crickets, and
eavesdrop awhile  as Cici, Bridget and Lindsay settle  in on the front porch.  
They won't mind.

In fact, they'll probably ask you to stay.

      


      Cici let the screen door squeak shut behind her as she went out onto the
porch and took her place in the rocker next to Lindsay's.  The last light of day
had faded to a deep purple twilight, silhouetting the poplar leaves in stark
black against the sky. Crickets trilled in and out.  Rockers thumped softly on
the freshly painted boards of the porch.  On cue, as it had been for the past
ten evenings just as the last daylight left the sky, there was the distant whine
of a bottle rocket, a muffled pop, and an umbrella of red, green, and gold light
cascaded against the eastern sky.
     “Ooh, nice,” observed Bridget, rocking.                                
     “Umm,” agreed Lindsay, passing Cici a cool glass of Chardonnay.  “Was
that Lori on the phone?  How is she?”
     “Terrific.”  Cici took a significant swallow of wine.  “My twenty year old
daughter is going to a party with Hugh Grant.”
     “No kidding!”
     “There’s going to be nothing but wild sex and free drugs.”
     “At a Hollywood party?” exclaimed Bridget, feigning shock. “Surely not!”
     And Lindsay added, “Thank God we never had anything like that when we
were in college.”
     “She’s wearing a swimsuit,” Cici pointed out with great deliberation, “that’
s held together at the bottom with three strands of Swarovski crystals.”
     Lindsay and Bridget sipped their wine in silence for a moment.  Then
Bridget said, “Guess she won’t be doing any actual swimming, then.”
     “It won’t matter,” Lindsay said, “since the swimming pool is probably
filled with champagne.”
     Cici sighed.  “My daughter is celebrating her birthday by going to a pool
party with Hugh Grant.  I’m sitting in a sweat pit with a thirty-foot hole in the
back yard and a ceiling that’s falling down.  What’s wrong with this picture?”
     “It’s a little cooler tonight,” Bridget offered.
     “And the fireworks are nice,” Lindsay said.  They watched as a red flare
spiraled upward and exploded into a canopy that covered half the night sky.    
Everyone made an appreciative sound for that one.  “Actually I think I like
this better than having them all on the Fourth of July.”
     Their neighbor Farley, having finally obtained his fireworks a mere two
weeks too late for the Independence Day celebration , had decided to prolong
the pleasure as long as possible by setting off a few each night from his back
yard.  The residents of Ladybug Farm had front row seats for every show.
     “She wanted me to thank you for the book, Bridge,” Cici said, “and she
loved the CD, Lindsay.  She’s going to send notes.”
     “She always writes such sweet notes,” Bridget said.
     “She’s a good girl,” Lindsay added.
     And Cici admitted, “I know.”  She sipped her wine and appreciated the
spectacle of another light show, this one red, white and blue, blossoming
against the sky.  “Would you go back to being twenty if you could?”
     Lindsay said,“For Hugh Grant? You bet your sweet booty.  Of course,”
she added thoughtfully, “he might be disappointed.  After all, I wouldn’t be
nearly as good looking as I am today.”
     Bridget chuckled.  “You couldn’t pay me to go back. Lord preserve me
from ever being that stupid again.”
     “It all seemed so simple then,” Cici agreed.  “Remember?  You made a
plan, you mapped out your life, and you figured all you had to do was sit back
and watch it unfold.  Your job was done.”
     “Hmm.” Lindsay sipped her wine.  “I was going to study at the Sorbonne.”
     Bridget said, “I was going to go to Africa and build irrigation systems.  
But first  I was going to marry a priest.”  When the other two looked at her
she explained with a wistful sigh, “I was wild about The Thornbirds back then.
I must have read it twenty times.”
     Lindsay lifted her eyebrows.  “It was a book?” She rocked back
thoughtfully. “What do you know about that?”
     Cici said, “When I first started working, right out of college,  I was
actually refused an apartment because I was a single woman.  They wouldn’t
even let me fill out an application.”
     Bridget sipped her wine, and  seemed a little embarrassed as she
reported, “When Jim and I were first married and things were tight, you
know, I applied for a job as a secretary at a glass factory.  The manager
wouldn’t hire me until he got my husband’s permission.”
     “Jesus,” Lindsay said.  
     “You should have slapped his face and walked out,” Cici
said.                                
     “You should have taken the apartment manager to court,” Bridget said.
     Both of them just smiled, sadly, reminiscently.
     “Hell no,” Lindsay said after a moment.  “You couldn’t pay me to go
back.”
     In the distance there was a fanfare series of pops, accompanied by a lively
explosion of red and white sparks near the horizon line.  They appreciated the
show while it lasted.  
     The startled crickets, silent during the fireworks, started chirping again.  
Cici said, “Well, I guess that’s it for the night.”
     “ I wonder how many more fireworks he has left?”
     “Maybe he should save some for New Year’s.”
     Bridget said, “I have a theory about the garden thief.”
     Cici and Lindsay looked at her with interest.  The Nannycam, cleverly set
up in a tree to record everything that happened during the night, was
unfortunately not equipped with night vision. So when two more stalks of corn
had gone missing, a review of twelve hours worth of tape had shown nothing
but  foggy darkness.  
     “If you’ll notice,” elucidated Bridget, leaning forward a little to capture
their attention, “all the thefts occur on the hedge side of the garden.”
     “I wouldn’t exactly call that tangle of blackberry vines and honeysuckle a
hedge,” Lindsay objected.
     “But it’s always the same row,” Bridget insisted.  “Right there, next to
cover.  I think whatever–or whoever– it is, is sneaking through the hedge at
night and pulling stuff out of the ground, then hiding back in the hedge before
anyone can catch him.”
     There was nothing but the sound of rocking chairs and crickets for awhile.  
Lindsay and Cici sipped their wine.  Cici said, “I don’t know, Bridge.  Sounds
pretty weird to me.”
     “You still don’t have a motive,” pointed out Lindsay.
     “I’m working on it,” Bridget pronounced darkly.
      A ladybug dive-bombed into Cici’s wine glass.  She plucked it out
absently and flicked it away.  She said, “It’s going to take the rest of the
summer to get the air conditioning installed.”
     “Wouldn’t be so bad if we could take a shower.”
     “We can take a shower,” Bridget pointed out, with an obvious effort to
remain positive. “We just can’t use more than five gallons of water doing it.”
     “We haven’t even gotten the  estimate on what digging the new drain field
is going to cost.”
     “Whatever it is,” Lindsay said, “it’s more than we can afford.”
     They were silent for awhile, rocking, listening to the crickets.
     “I guess,” Bridget said in a moment, “this is the best part about not being
twenty any more.  We know that plans hardly ever work out the way you
planned them.”
     Lindsay smiled in the dark, and raised her glass.  “Here’s to not looking
back.”
     Cici rocked forward and raised her glass as well.  “Here’s to Hugh
Grant,” she said.
     “And here’s to catching the hedgerow garden thief and prosecuting his
sorry ass within an inch of his life,” added Lindsay.
     Bridget raised her glass and grinned.  “I’ll drink to that.”
     They touched glasses, drank, and sat back and listened to the crickets
until it was time for bed.   
A Year on
Ladybug Farm