Page 10 of The Magic of Ordinary Days
That night, after all the workers had left and Ray came in exhausted and dirty, he took me out beside the barn and showed me the collapsible wooden crates packed with fresh onions.
He offered to drive me over to the place where the crates were stored for months at a time in adobe storage buildings.
But I could tell he was only doing so to placate me, so I declined.
And after that, although I’d been on the farm for only two weeks, I’d already decided to keep my distance from the business of farming.
The next day, I began work on the flower garden.
I pulled up the old faded whirligigs, set them aside for repainting, and gathered up the colored stones that Ray’s mother had collected.
As Ray drove the first truckload of onion crates away toward the storage buildings, I chopped up the deep-rooted weeds in the old flower garden and prepared the soil for bulbs.
These things my mother had taught me. Always, she had liked the feel of dirt between her fingers, and of course the results of her efforts—blooming flowers.
Even after she had hired on household help, she cared for the flower gardens herself, often taking us girls outside with her.
Mother taught us how to break up the frost-hardened topsoil after winter, how to turn and mix the dirt beds in spring, how to plant seeds and bulbs, how to shape and prune the emerging new plants.
It was one of the few times we were allowed to get dirty.
In the kitchen, I expanded my efforts beyond basic dishes.
Once I cooked two Mexico-style omelets from a recipe I found in the library cookbook.
While he ate, Ray glanced up at me after every bite or two.
He also made overly kind remarks about the quality of my cooking, but when he thought I wasn’t looking, I could see him picking out the chopped onions I had folded into the eggs.
In the afternoons, I walked about the house, outbuildings, and stock pond.
Sometimes I could see the dark spots of the workers’ bodies far off in the distant fields.
I worked in the flower garden and then made my way to the back shed.
There I found other artifacts—a wire rug beater, a box of fabric scraps that had probably been collected for quilting, an aluminum teakettle, and a parlor carpet broom.
The hound, whose name I found out was Franklin, dubbed in honor of our President, kept me company and often smacked his loose lips or rolled on his back as I was expanding my collection.
But I wondered what to do with it all. Certainly the artifacts should be kept for future generations to study and enjoy, perhaps even in a museum.
But whom could I trust to do that? Each day I was adding to the burlap bag until it rose to the brim with the pieces I thought were most worth salvaging.
But what then? Perhaps, on my next trip to town, I would inquire of any collectors in the area.
Over dinner, I said to Ray, “Martha told me your grandparents once built a tarpaper shack near here. Do you know where the remains are?”
Ray finished chewing. “I know where they used to be.”
“Used to be?”
He shrugged. “I tore it down and plowed under the ground about two springs ago.”
I had to laugh. “You have to be joking.”
Now he looked confused. “It was just a bunch of weathered old boards. That’s all that was left.” His lips came together, barely moving as he spoke. “It wasn’t anything to look at, I tell you.”
“In the ground,” I told him. “There’s no telling what pieces of history might have been in the ground, under those boards.”
He cleared his throat. “I needed that land for crops. People overseas are starving.”
Of course, I knew this already. “In just one look inside one of your sheds, I found valuable antiques. There’s no telling what I might have found around that shack.”
He bumped the edge of the table with his fist. “Never thought of it.”
“Well, it’s done.” I found myself shaking my head, then made myself stop. “Ray, I’ve noticed that you have no family photos, no personal items that belonged to your parents in this house.” I deliberately didn’t mention Daniel. “Where do you keep those things?”
He cleared his throat again. “Don’t rightly know. Better ask Martha.”
I couldn’t hide my frustration. “You have nothing?”
He shrugged, then rose from the table. He took long strides across the room and clumped through the door of the bunkroom. He let the door close heavily behind him.
The next evening, with Franklin sniffing along at my heels, I walked one of the narrow roadways, down rutted tracks between fields.
In the distance, I could see the workers.
Bent over the ground, their bodies hooked like boomerangs, they were working later than usual that day.
As I drew close to a recently dug onion field, I could hear the hum of their conversations marked with occasional spurts of laughter.
Two young women stood apart from the rest of the workers, directly in my path.
Engrossed in pursuit and moving ever so cautiously, they were either studying the ground or something near to it.
One of the girls held a notebook in her hand. They didn’t see me move near.
I took another step closer, and they jumped together. “Excuse us,” one of them said. Then they turned away and began to walk off.
“No please,” I said. “What are you studying?”
They turned back, and one girl answered with a smile, “Butterflies.”
Standing and facing me together now, I saw that they were nearly identical in stature, with the same shade of glossy, blue-black hair fixed in bubble-cut style.
They wore checkered cotton work shirts and slacks over sneakers.
The older of the two had a fuller face with a few pockmarks on her cheeks.
The younger of the two had a face perfectly oval in shape and not a mark on it.
A practice rug and a masterpiece, I thought. And certainly they were sisters.
“Do you collect?”
They laughed together, at the same pitch and stopping at the same moment.
But there the similarities ended. Lorelei, the younger of the two Umahara sisters, introduced herself, flipped a curl around her ear, and said, “Rose could never kill anything.” She held my eyes with a firm, bold-eyed gaze and spoke with a siren of a voice that told me she didn’t bow to anyone.
Rose’s voice had half the strength of her sister‘s, and she talked with crossed arms and lowered lids, as if uncertainty were her frequent companion. “We log our observations in this notebook.”
“I’m Livvy.” Turning back toward the house, I said, “I live in the farmhouse.”
When both girls looked back down to the ground, back to the place where earlier they had been studying, I asked, “And what did I cause you to miss?”
Again they laughed. “We thought it was the Purple Hairstreak, a butterfly only found in Colorado or nearby,” Rose answered. “But upon closer look, we found that it wasn’t.”
“We look for butterflies,” Lorelei said. “It’s our hobby.”
I knew little of insects and honestly had never found them of much interest, but I didn’t want them to leave yet. “Are there many species?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Thousands of varieties,” answered Lorelei. “And the names are as wonderful as the creatures themselves.”
“Silver-Spotted Skippers,” said Rose.
“Eyed Hawkmoths,” said Lorelei.
“And Speckled Woods.”
My mother had once felt the same way about flower names.
I remembered how the words had rolled off her tongue like silk off the bolt.
Lady Slippers, Monkeyflowers, Snapdragons, and Johnny Jump-ups.
At the university, the professors who genuinely loved their subjects were always the most interesting teachers.
Enthusiasm for a topic made it enticing to others.
And these two girls were clearly crazy for butterflies.
“Lovely,” I said.
After a moment of silence, Franklin weaseled up between the girls and me, sniffing over the ground and effectively scaring off any butterflies that might still have been near.
Lorelei folded the notebook and stuck it under her arm.
Rose glanced back over her shoulder, toward the other workers.
Clearly they were reluctant to talk longer, but before they left, I invited them to come visit me at the house.
“I have cold bottles of Coca-Cola in the icebox that I’d love to share,” I told them.
They smiled, nodded, and said they would come, but I didn’t know whether to plan on it or not.
They turned back to the field, and I headed back to the house.
Before I left their sight completely, however, I looked back over my shoulder.
As they walked away, both girls, their silhouettes dark against the deepening sunshine, stepped about on tiptoes, around the dandelions, looking for what I could only presume were more butterflies.
The sight of them together, backed by the sunlight, made me turn and walk away even faster.
Abby and Bea. Only a few hours’ travel away in Denver, they might as well have been oceans away.