Please log in to recommend or discuss...
A friend of mine lives in Austin, and he swears that the summer there is hotter than it is in Virginia. I disagree. While his shoes might melt to the pavement, I sweat through my clothes when I go to take out the trash. Now, I don’t want to have to buy new shoes all the time of course, but I would like to not feel like I have to stand in front of the freezer after a simple chore.
It’s probably enough to say that my body was not built for Virginia summers. And yet, I love it here, and I love the garden in the summer when everything is beginning to fruit and Sawyer and I can go out and harvest beans and tomatoes before the sun is too far into the sky.
That boy is a gardening machine these days. He grabs my market basket as soon as he has shoes on his feet and heads out, sometimes with me, sometimes with Beauregard, our Maine coon cat. He gathers all the tomatoes, choosing only the reddest ones and not culling our produce by picking everything with fruit like he did last year.
After harvest, we take some for ourselves, some for his grandparents, and some for our friends, and then anything left over – most days we have something left over – we carry our goods up to the small roadside stand we’d set up for our neighbors to display everything for people passing by. I’d left a small jar there that said, “Sawyer’s College Fund,” and sometimes someone would slip a little cash in there for him. He loved that, but he also loved checking at the end of the day to see what we had “sold.” It was a beautiful routine.
On this particular July morning, the tomatoes were thriving, and Sawyer picked a dozen huge beefsteaks and three or four pints of cherries, too. The fruit loved this heat, which made me able to tolerate it, at least until 10 a.m.
Our harvest sorted, he and I walked up to the roadside stand and set out our offerings. Right now besides tomatoes, we mostly had onions and beans, and I was glad to see every
thing from the day before had been picked up. Plus, Sawyer had $5 in his tip jar. He had been wonderful about keeping that money in his piggy bank and then letting me deposit it every month. And in exchange for his help with the garden, he got a weekly allowance that he got to spend on Matchbox cars and various forms of boomerangs.
As we set out our tomatoes, a pickup truck slowed to a stop in our driveway, and an older man stepped out. “Uncle Saul!” Sawyer shouted as he saw one of my favorite people, my best friend Mika’s uncle. “You want some tomatoes?”
“How did you know?” Saul said as he grabbed Sawyer by the arms and swung him around, then set him in down front of the stand. “That’s exactly why I stopped.”
I had offered Saul free produce over and over again, but true to his nature, he had refused and came regularly to “buy” his own vegetables. I found this endearing for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he had a thriving garden at his house. Mika said he took the things he bought from us and his own surplus and donated it to the local food pantry.
Today, he picked up two huge tomatoes and deposited a $20 bill in Sawyer’s cup. I rolled my eyes at his overgenerosity, but I didn’t say anything. It would do no good. This was just who Saul was.
“Thanks for these, Saw,” he said. “But I’m glad I caught you up here. Saves me from having to use that blasted phone.” Saul hated the phone with a surprising vehemence. To me he said, “I have a job for you.”
“A salvage job?” I asked. The summer had been kind of quiet on the work front because of the heat and family vacations, and while business at my online and brick-and-mortar stores had been booming, I was feeling anxious about having enough inventory. “What is it?”
He smiled. “You know that old house up north of town, the one covered in ivy?”
“The Sumner Place? They’re tearing that down?” The house was in bad shape, but I had always hoped that someone would refurbish it. It was beautiful and old, built around 1790. “That’s a shame.”
“Oh no, Paisley girl,” Saul said. “The new owners are fixing it up. Some folks from DC who want to have a second home down here. They’re going all out. Fixing up the outbuildings, too, even plan to redo the slave cabin out back.”
“There’s a slave quarter still standing?” I felt my heart pick up. “Wow. That’s amazing. But what do they need me for if they’re going to restore the property?”
His grin grew even wider. “That’s the best part. They want you to go through the attic and closets and take anything valuable. Then they’ll hire a crew to recycle and trash the rest.”
“Whoa, that’s amazing. Did you guys talk numbers?” I’d finally learned that I needed to be money conscious, not just opportunity aware, if I wanted my business to thrive.
He nodded and winked. “They are eager to preserve as much of the history as they can, but they also need the house to work for them. So they’d consider it a favor to have you come in and take what you want at no charge.”
I stared at him for a minute. “They’re going to let me salvage, take anything I want, and not charge me a cent.” I shook my head. This had to be too good to be true.
“That’s right. There’s only one catch.”
I sighed, but then I grinned. “They want it done ASAP.”
“You got it, girl,” Saul said. “Any chance you’re available today?”
I looked down at my four-year-old. “What do you think, Saw? You up for some dirty work?”
“Yeah!” he said as he pumped his fist in the air.
“We’re in,” I said. “Let me just get this guy back to his lair.” I scooped up Beau and began to walk down the driveway.
The next two minutes were quite loud in our rural neighborhood as Saw proceeded to honk Saul’s horn all the way down the driveway back toward the house. I said a silent apology to neighbors near and far and grabbed my keys and wallet after depositing my grouchy cat onto his velour blanket on the sofa. He basically rolled his eyes at me as he forced himself to lay down in utter luxury. Poor guy.
Then, with Saw buckled into his seat in my car and safely away from the truck horn, I followed Saul up north of town to the old house that had been the focus of so many stories through my years growing up here in Octonia. Little kids told stories about a creepy old lady who lived inside and never came out, and when we got to high school, those stories became about ghosts and murders within the walls.
When I’d gotten interested in history in college, I’d done a little research on the house and found that it had been unoccupied since the 1960s, had never been the site of a ghost hunting expedition, and was not the place of record for any murder. That said, it still fascinated me to this day.
The
plantation had originally been owned by the Sumner family, one of the first settlers in Octonia. They’d come up, as had many rich Virginians, from the Tidewater when the king began gifting land to people who would claim it for “king and country.” I’ve always wondered what the Monacan Indians who were the first human occupants of this land had thought of this selling of property they had always lived on but never claimed to own. Surely, the audacity of these White people must have shocked them, to say the least.
Within a few years of getting their land grant, the people the Sumners enslaved had built a small wooden house on the property and cleared much of the land of trees. Then, they had gone to work building the big brick house that was what most of us called the Sumner Place now.
The structure was like so many in Virginia – brick, symmetrical, and columned. I was eager to see the inside, although I imagined it was a traditional two over two (two rooms above and two below) with maybe a central hallway if the Sumners were a little wealthier than most.
As we drove up the lane, I narrated what I could see for Saw, pretending as if he cared. I told him how the layout of the big cedars on either side of the driveway showed that this was the original entrance road and that the horsehead on the pole near the circular driveway meant it was a hitching post for horses. I pointed out the size of the boxwoods out front and said they had probably been put in when the house had been built.
To his credit, my four-year-old proved he’d listened by asking “Can I play in the bot woods?”
I laughed. His pronunciations always made me smile. “I expect so, Saw, but let’s meet the people who own the house and ask first, okay?”
My kid, like his mother, loved the smell of boxwoods. My dad Lee thought the shrubs smelled gross, but for me, they smelled like story and home. So as we walked through them with Saul to the front door, I took a deep, deep breath of the scent washing over me.
Before we could even knock on the massive double door at the front of the house, a thin blond woman in a white pantsuit opened the door and said, “Hello! I’m so glad you could come. You must be Paisley.” She stepped forward and extended her hand.
“Yes, ma’am. It’s nice to meet you. Thank you for this generous offer.” I reached back with my free hand to pat my son’s back as he hid behind me. “This is Sawyer, my son. He’s my apprentice.”
“Ooh, learning early, Sawyer. That’s wonderful. When you’re ready, my nephew Wyatt is here. He’s four, and I bet you guys could play together if you’d like.”
Saw’s wide brown eyes peeked up at me with a question.
“When you’re ready, that’s just fine with me,” I said. Then I turned to the woman, “If you don’t mind watching him.”
“Don’t mind at all. Our nanny Belinda is amazing, and it’s actually easier for her when Wyatt has a friend over.”
“Tell me about it.” I finally understood why parents made such a big deal about playdates, especially for only children. I loved them because it meant I didn’t have to play cars or hide and seek or whatever for an hour or two.
Inside, I inhaled deeply once again. The air was musty and the light dim, but I could smell the long stories of this house. And when I looked around, the 12-foot ceilings in the central hall met the saffron-colored plaster walls with the loveliest crown molding I’d ever seen. It was scalloped and beveled in an intricate pattern that added a touch of elegance to the otherwise simple lines of the room.
“If you all will follow me, I’ll introduce you to my husband, Mark.” She led us down the hall into what was clearly an addition at the back of the house, where a sunny modern kitchen extended out to the edge of a bluff overlooking what had to be the Rose River.
I sighed and said, “This is beautiful. Wow. Thank you so much for having us out, Ms., Um....“
“I’m so sorry,” our host said. “I totally neglected to introduce myself. I’m Mariah Owen.” She turned to a thin, smiling man at the table by the windows. “And this is my husband, Mark. Mark, this is Paisley. You know Saul, and this little man is Sawyer.”
“It’s nice to meet all of you. Can I get you some coffee?” Mark said as he stood. “Sawyer, would you like some hot chocolate?”
I felt Sawyer nod against my thighs. “He would, but he prefers ‘warm’ chocolate,” I said.
“You got it. Please have a seat.” He pointed toward the large round table he had just left.
The three of us sat down, Sawyer settled on my lap, and Mark brought over a glass coffee carafe and mugs. Then, he popped another mug into the microwave for fifteen seconds and carried over a perfectly lukewarm cup of hot cocoa for my son, who proceeded to drink it in three seconds flat and then say, “Can I go play with Wyatt now?”
“He warms up quick,” I said with a smile.
“Sure thing, Sawyer.” Mariah said as she put out a hand. “Come with me, and I’ll introduce you to Wyatt and Belinda. I think they’re in the sandbox.”
Without another glance at me, my son walked out the door off the kitchen toward what I could now see was a very large sandbox with not just one but two kid-sized excavators in it. “I may never get him to leave,” I said to Saul.
Mark laughed. “That’s what Wyatt’s mother says. He stays with us a few days every month while she’s getting treatments. Gives both of them a break.”
“Oh no, cancer,” I said.
“Yeah, ovarian. The chemo seems to be working, though, so I’m hopeful for my baby sis,” Mark said and then cleared his throat.
“She’ll be in our prayers,” Saul said. “Do they live close?”
“Richmond. She’s got a great team of doctors, and her husband is amazing. But it’s hard for everyone when she’s so sick. This way, I get to be close to my nephew, and they get to rest and recover without worrying about him.” Mark sighed. “It’s a big silver lining for a really hard time.”
I nodded. “I’m glad you guys can be together, and thanks for letting Sawyer play. He loves making friends.”
“Anytime he wants to come over, just give us a call.” Mark laughed. “But if you agree to help us out, you might just be here yourself for a while.”
“Tell me more about what you’re looking for.” I knew what Saul had said, of course, and I was already sold on the idea. But I wanted to hear from the homeowners exactly what they wanted me to do and on what terms. It gave me a chance to commit for myself and not put Saul in the middle.
Mariah walked back in and sat down beside me before pouring herself a cup of coffee. “What are we talking about?”
“I was just about to tell Paisley about the project and scope of work,” Mark said.
“You’re so formal, dear,” she said with a smile and a soft squeeze of his hand. “Mark works in grants, so he’s always talking in business terms.” She winked at her husband. “Go right ahead.” “Well, ...
