Chapter 7 - Planting New Roots
Two weeks after Easter, the dogwood blossoms outside my parents' house had finally fallen, carpeting the lawn in a delicate drift of white petals, while out on our property, the spring planting season was in full swing.
Nolan had taken a week off from his woodworking shop to help me build something I had been dreaming about for years: a massive, multi-tiered greenhouse behind our kitchen garden.
We spent Saturday morning mixing soil, hauling fertilizer bags, and setting cedar posts deep into the rich, dark Missouri earth. Lark was running between our legs with a plastic garden trowel, digging up earthworms and proudly declaring herself the Queen of the Mud.
“Careful with the heirloom tomato starts, Your Majesty,” Nolan laughed, catching her by the waist and hoisting her up onto his shoulders as she shrieked with laughter.
I leaned against a wooden post, wiping a streak of potting soil off my forehead with the back of my hand, watching them. The sunlight caught Lark’s pale silver-blonde curls, making them glow like a halo. And then it caught the side of Nolan’s face—his dark brown hair, his strong jaw, the crinkles around his eyes when he smiled.
Genetics are a strange and complicated science, as I had spent my life learning. Sometimes they skip a generation. Sometimes recessive traits lie dormant in the deep ancestral basement for a hundred years, waiting for the right moment to step out into the light.
Lark’s blonde hair didn't come from my side of the family, and it didn't come from Nolan’s immediate line. But digging through old family albums three weeks after the fallout, tucked behind a faded photograph of my paternal grandmother taken in the winter of 1942, I found what Karen and my mother had spent years pretending didn't exist: a small, sepia-toned portrait of my great-grandmother Martha, staring out at the camera with a cascade of platinum-silver curls and piercing blue eyes.
The trait had jumped three generations, waiting quietly for its turn to be seen.
No blackmail. No secrets. Just blood, time, and nature taking its honest course.
“You got a letter in the mail today,” Nolan said, setting Lark down gently in the mulch so she could plant her plastic trowel in a bucket of dirt. He walked over to me, wiping his hands on a rag, his eyes warm and steady.
“From who?” I asked.
“Your mother.”
I paused, holding a small pot of basil in my palm. The envelope had been sitting on the kitchen counter all morning. I hadn't touched it.
“Did you open it?”
May you like
“No,” Nolan said softly. “It’s yours. But I can drive down there and tell her not to send any more if you want.”
I shook my head, setting the basil pot down on the potting bench. “No. Let’s go inside. I think it’s time to read it.”
