Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 125117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
So she wrote back to her mother. I’m fine. I’m in New Orleans. You don’t have to worry about me.
The responses came immediately. So immediately that for a moment, Greta thought she’d sent the text to the family thread rather than just her mother.
Adelaide was first: You’re in New Orleans? What are you doing there?
Then Tillie: Who do you know in New Orleans? Do you have someplace to stay?
Then Maggie: oooh, new orleans is supposed to be so rad. where r u staying?
Sadie did not reply.
Rolling her eyes, she switched over to the family thread. Everyone must be over at her parents’ house as usual.
yes, i’m in new orleans. i’m fine. it’s great here. i’m staying for a month.
Replies of a month?, a MONTH?, for a month!!??, and Wait, you’re gonna be gone for a whole month??! followed quickly thereafter, and Greta sighed.
They reached Truman’s door, and Horse stood respectfully outside it, in case Greta was still having a conversation.
“You’re very strange, do you know that?” she asked him.
He blinked slowly and cocked his head, as if to say You’re not the most normal yourself, you know.
***
The next morning, Greta and Horse set off for their morning walk early. After her exhausting day of travel, Greta had crawled into bed at 9:00 p.m. and woken up just after 6:00 a.m., feeling deliciously rested and excited to explore.
“Take me to a coffee shop, please,” she instructed Horse, just in case he really did understand.
After a few blocks, a coffee shop came into view.
“What the hell, man,” Greta muttered at Horse. “This is eerie.”
Horse just crossed the street excitedly.
“Hey, it’s a Horse,” said a man in coveralls on a ladder, fiddling with the rain gutter outside the café. “Where’s Truman?”
“You know him?” Greta asked.
“Sure. Comes in all the time.”
“Oh, uh, I’m Greta. I’m staying at his place for a bit. I’m from Maine.”
She was unnerved by the recognition, something she’d thought she’d left behind in Owl Island.
“Welcome,” the man said, sweeping his arms out as if to encompass the whole city.
“Thanks. Er, can Horse go in there?”
“Sure,” he said, as if there was no reason a large dog wouldn’t be welcome in an eating establishment.
Greta got her coffee as well as a treat for Horse, handed to her with a wink by the barista, who also clearly knew the dog.
As they walked, the cool morning heated and more and more people appeared.
Greta kept to one street at first, thinking she’d follow it and see where she ended up. But things she absolutely had to see kept revealing themselves around corners and through intersections, and soon she just let her eyes guide her.
Horse, now off his normal route, seemed perfectly happy to walk by her side, a companion rather than a compass.
Greta breathed deeply of the lush plants she walked past, greenery-starved from the Maine winter. Here, ferns and myrtle curled fingers around each other and sunflowers stood tall. Jasmine scented the air, and the porch of a yellow-and-white house was crawling with passionflower. Orange trees grew in a corner lot, the fruit clinging cartoonishly to the trees like something out of a juice commercial. Greta couldn’t believe they actually grew like that. She imagined waking on a warm December morning and walking outside to pluck an orange from her own tree for breakfast. The prospect made her giddy.
Greta’s love affair with plants had happened slowly.
First she’d been given a spider plant as a gift, and she’d hung it in the window, not sure what else to do with it. When it began sending out arms with miniature versions of itself at the end of them, Greta had been amazed. To see something replicate itself, by itself, without any intervention…it made her think about plants in a completely different way.
Then came another plant and another. She followed Instagram accounts and watched YouTube videos, googled facts, and downloaded apps.
Succulents were her next obsession, and she would drive from garden store to garden store on the mainland, pluck fallen leaves out of the dirt and off the floor around the succulents, then take them home and watch them recreate themselves.
One afternoon trip to even a crappy garden center could yield pocketfuls of leaves. Before she knew it, she had dishes of sprouting succulent leaves on every windowsill of her house. She would check on them each morning, plucking them up to see the whiskery roots that had shot out in the night.
Sometimes they would sit dormant for weeks, and just when they would begin to shrivel and she would contemplate tossing them away, new life would emerge, feeding on the old growth. Self-vampiric, self-creating, they would birth themselves again and again, ad infinitum.
Greta admired them because they could do what she could not: be themselves, over and over, no compromises, no family.
Then winter came, and the weak Maine sun wasn’t enough. So then grow lights and reflectors and heat mats and more. Little by little, her home became a greenhouse. Became a sanctuary for the bits and pieces of plants she rescued and revered.