That’s why I planted the spurs at the southern end. It looks best in the afternoon light. She dismounted and wound the duchess’s reins around the corral post, because she seemed to be falling behind. ” Can I watch him work?” he asked. “There’s not much to see,” he said. Only nearby. “It doesn’t bother me,” she said.
So he sat on the top crossbar of the corral and watched him work, and they talked. He learned that he had come to New Mexico from Mississippi 7 years ago, when he was 21 with $150, a horse and the determination to own a piece of land that no one could take from him. He learned that his mother had died the year before he left Missouri and that his father had died when he was 12 and that he had been practically on his own ever since , working on cattle drives and as a ranch hand, until he saved enough to buy his own place.
He learned that he managed about 200 head of beef cattle on 360 acres, that he had a full-time helper named Billy Cruz, 19, from a valley family, and that he grew a vegetable garden in addition to the flower field because he liked fresh vegetables and didn’t trust the town’s prices for beans. He learned that she had grown up in a small town with her father and a rotating group of tenants who kept the house financially afloat.
that she had once been briefly engaged to a young man who had gone to Dandor on business and found in Dandor a reason to stay that had nothing to do with her, that she had learned to ride properly by bribing a stable boy with apples who could read Latin. Her father had been eccentric in his educational ambitions and she found it useful mainly for reading old land contracts and impressing people who assumed she couldn’t.
He laughed at this last bit, a real, sudden, and unreserved laugh, and transformed his face in a way that made her chest do something inconvenient. She returned to the village mid-morning, feeling more alive than she had in months. The summer of 1878 passed like summers in the Cimeran Valley: long, hot, and dramatic, with afternoon thunderstorms descending from the mountains like clockwork and leaving the air clean and electric afterward.
Anie settled into her job at the Hendrix freight company with the quiet confidence of someone who had finally found a use for all the things she was good at. I knew the memory load manifests in the first month. He knew the drivers’ names and their routes, their tendencies, and their billing disputes.
The difference between a genuine delivery discrepancy and a driver helping himself out with a few extra dollars on a long trip. Carl Hendrix began consulting her on decisions beyond the books. He had to accept the railroad contract to Chison, Tepique and Santa Fe, which would involve hiring three more drivers and buying two new wagons.
What were the margins on the Taos route versus the mouse route? She would give him numbers and analyses, and when he asked her what she thought, she would tell him, and she was usually right. She would go to the Hendricks’ house for dinner on Sundays twice a month, where Cao’s wife, Marta, a warm and competent woman who had come to New Mexico from Ohio and never looked back, introduced her to Simeran’s small social life .
There were dances at the Grange Ballroom on the first Saturday of each month, mass on Sundays, and occasional dinners at a ranch or other that served as a combined social, economic, and political forum for the Valley community. I saw Arasad at those meetings. He was not a man who moved with ease in social situations. She went to dances and dinners because it was expected and because she wasn’t unfriendly, but she kept to the edges of the rooms in a way that suggested she found large groups of people slightly noisier than strictly necessary.
She spoke to the men she dealt with. Fence disputes, cattle prices, water rights. He was practical with ease, but with people he didn’t know well he was cautious, measuring his words before using them. Añe, who had grown up managing the social requirements of a guest house and keeping four different tenants happy at once, had no such reluctance.
She was warm, fast-paced, and fun, in a dry way that people either picked up on immediately or didn’t pick up on at all. And most people in Cimeran grasped it quickly. She was loved. But at the monthly dances something happened that neither of them commented on directly, but that everyone else in the room noted down within about three months.
They always ended up talking to each other. It wasn’t something that was arranged. Annie would arrive with Martha Hanrex and make her rounds through the room, entering through the side door and standing near the window with a glass of whatever they were serving. And at some point during the night, sometimes early, sometimes late, they would meet on the same corner talking.
They spoke of the concession problems, which were ongoing and terrifying, with ranchers and settlers on both sides of the land dispute living in a state of low-grade armed anxiety. They were talking about the approaching railroad that would change everything. They talked about Missouri and about the town and what people sacrificed when they left the place they came from.
After the October dance, he accompanied her to the guesthouse where she lived, because the night was dark and the streets were not always safe. He said it directly, as he said most things. “I’ll go with her,” he said. “I’m going in that direction anyway.” She knew he wasn’t going that way because she had seen his horse tied up outside the stable, which was in the completely opposite direction, but she didn’t point it out.
They walked in the cool, dark autumn air and talked about the first snowfall, which would come soon, and whether Hendrix’s railway contract was a good idea. She believed so. He thought the capital requirements were risky. And from a book she had been reading, one of the newest novels that had arrived on the stagecoach.
When they arrived at his door, he touched his hat and said, “Good night.” And she went inside and stood in the darkness of her room for a moment, feeling the warmth of the conversation slowly fading away. How does heat dissipate when the source moves away? November arrived, and with it the first real frost, and the field of flowers on Era’s ranch went to rest under a brittle skin of ice.
Anie rode out one Sunday and found him cutting the dead stems, working methodically between the rows. “Does it bother you?” she asked. Watching them die. He thought about it in the way she had come to expect. genuinely, not by reflex. No, he said, because I know they’ll come back. The roots are still there.
He turned a stem over in his hand. My mother used to say that things that go to rest are not dead, they are just waiting. She looked at the bare field and then at him. She seemed to be a wise woman. “It was,” he said. wiser than the situation she was in most of the time. He didn’t explain what he meant by that, and she didn’t ask because she understood that there are certain truths that don’t require explanation to be understood.
She helped him cut the stems. He lent her some thick gloves that were too big for her, and they worked together among the rose bushes in silent camaraderie. And by the time they finished, the field looked stripped and a little melancholic, but also somehow prepared, as if it had put its affairs in order. She stayed for coffee afterwards, something she had never done before, and he made it strong and black, and served it in two tin cups on the small kitchen table.
Her house was, as she would have imagined, simple, practical, clean, with some personal things that betrayed a particular sensitivity. A small bookcase with a surprising number of volumes, a hand-drawn map of the valley pinned to the wall above the desk, a jar of dried wildflowers on the windowsill that she recognized as larkspur.
“Were you some?” she said, pointing at the jar. “For winter,” he said. It helps to have something to look at. She nodded, understanding completely. They talked for 2 hours in that kitchen. The afternoon light shifted and transformed around her, moving across the table in slow golden bars. And the brown and white dog, whose name was Douglas, as she learned, slept under the table and sometimes rested his snout on her boot.
Outside, the wind picked up and shook the poplar trees by the stream. When he finally got up to leave, he realized that he hadn’t thought about his father, or Jarold Hall, or PBLO, or any of the burdens he had carried during the previous year. During all the time she sat in that kitchen, she hadn’t thought about any of that and pondered it all the way back.
It was Martha Hanres who finally said what apparently everyone in the valley was already saying to each other. “You and Arrasn,” Martha said in the straightforward, cheerful way she said most things while they ate a pot of beans at her kitchen table in late November. “What about us?” Annie said. “Don’t play dumb,” Marta said without meaning any harm.
“You go there every Sunday. He comes to town on Tuesdays, which used to be Thursdays, by the way. He changed his supply day, and he walked you home from the November dance and stood outside talking to you at your door for 30 minutes before he left. An got the hang of that. He told me he was going there anyway.
His horse was in the stable. ‘I know,’ said Marta, smiling. ‘He’s a good man, Annie. The people in this valley trust him. That’s saying something these days .’ ‘I know that too,’ said Annie. ‘ So what’s the problem?’ asked Marta. ‘Because from where I see it, you like him quite a lot.’ Annie was silent for a moment, turning her coffee cup over in her hands.
Outside the kitchen window, Cimmeran Street was quiet under the flat November sky. ‘ I’ve built something here,’ she said at last.” Work, the room, the routine. I have worked hard to not depend on anyone’s good opinion. “One thing does not exclude the other,” Marta said gently.
“In my experience, sometimes yes,” Annie said. “When you love someone, you give them a kind of power over you that can be misused.” Marta was silent for a moment, then said, “That’s fear talking, not a fact.” Anie couldn’t find a good answer for that. The incident with Ruben Crew happened in December, which is when things started moving faster than Annie had anticipated.
Rubén Cry was one of three brothers who raised cattle on the west side of the valley. They weren’t exactly bad men, but they were the kind of people who take up more space than they should and who had a particular difficulty accepting that a woman could be in charge of something they needed. Ruben had been disputing a freight bill for six weeks, claiming that he had been overcharged for a shipment of rattan wire.
And when Cao Hanres asked Annie to sort out the matter, she reviewed the weight manifests and delivery receipts with the patience of someone who had done that job her entire adult life. The numbers were clear. Cry had been charged correctly. I had simply assumed that since the bill had been prepared by a woman, it was wrong.
She sent him a written response that detailed the calculation step by step in terms that left no room for misinterpretation. He arrived at the office. He was a big, ruddy-faced man with a voice accustomed to filling rooms. He entered without knocking and stood in front of her desk with the delivery receipt in his hand and told her that he wasn’t going to be robbed by an accounting girl who didn’t understand how the freight business worked.
She looked at him for a moment, then asked him what specific game he was playing. He pointed out the calculation of the wire’s weight. She turned the ledger over so he could read it and guided him through each number slowly and precisely. She did this without raising her voice, without showing irritation, and without letting him interrupt her more than twice before directing him back to the numbers.
By the time he finished, the arithmetic was so obviously correct that there was nothing left to discuss. He stood there for a moment and she could see him recalibrate, deciding between doubling down on anger or accepting the math. He was still deciding when Arrasne came through the door. She had come to the village for supplies, Tuesday supplies, which Annie now knew were not accidental, and had apparently noticed Craya’s horse outside and had gone in to see what was happening.
She stood in the doorway and looked at Ruben Crey, then at Annie, and her expression was calm in a way that was harder than anger. Cry said, everything’s fine here. “ Business matter,” Cry said, his voice slightly altered. “Miss Houson’s work is impeccable,” Era said. “So I’ve heard from every challenger in the valley.
” There was a silence in which several things were communicated without being spoken. Then Cry took his delivery slip, mumbled something that was probably an acknowledgment and possibly an apology if one was charitable. And he left. Anie looked at Era. He was handling it. He said. I know, he said.
You had him with the numbers. I just thought he looked like he needed a minute to gracefully make up his mind. She considered this. Era, she admitted to herself, was reasonable. Thank you, she said. But I don’t need to be looked after. I know that too, he said. I wasn’t looking after you. I came in to collect the mail.
He held up his hand, and she saw that he was indeed holding an envelope. The mailbox is right there. She glanced at the mailbox. In fact, it was right behind her, which meant he had every right to be in that room, regardless of Ruben Crey. “Now “ I see,” she said. “I’ll get out of your way,” he said with that smile that never quite materialized.
He crossed to the mailbox, collected what was waiting for him, and left. She sat there after he was gone, feeling the room regain its ordinary dimensions. And then she felt very strongly that Martha Han had probably been right about most things. She told him she liked the first Saturday in December at the barn dance between the third and fourth songs of the night.
It wasn’t an elaborate declaration. She wasn’t a woman given to elaborate declarations. She found him near the window with his glass as usual and walked over to him and they talked for a while about nothing in particular. And then, in a pause in the conversation, she looked right at him and said, “I think you know I’ve been coming to your ranch on Sundays because I want to see you.
” He looked at her for a moment. “I know,” he said. “I’ve been coming to town on Tuesdays for the same reason.” “I wanted to say it plainly,” she said, “ because I’m not good at this ‘ nothing said’ thing.” “And everyone expects the other to understand.” “Me neither,” he said. ” Good,” she said, “then we understand each other.
” “I would like to formally court her,” he said. “If that’s alright with you.” “That’s right,” she said. They stood there for a moment in the noise and heat of the dance, and she felt something settling inside her , a certain tension she had been holding onto since the town had silently gathered.
“We danced,” she said. “ I dance terribly,” he said. “Me too,” she said. They danced anyway, and they both danced badly, and it was perfectly fine. He formally courted her the following Sunday at the boarding house, and they walked along the river path because the day was unusually warm for December, one of those clear, dry winter days in New Mexico that seem to belong to a completely different season.
The cottonwoods along the Cimeran River were bare, but the light through their bare branches was beautiful, casting a lace of shadows on the path. They talked about their lives with an ease that felt both new and completely familiar, as if they had been preparing for this conversation for months, which, in fact, they had .
He told her more about Missouri, about his mother’s garden, about how she planted flowers even when there was hardly enough money for food, because she said beauty wasn’t a luxury, but a necessity. He told her about his father, who had been a difficult man, not violent, but cold, the kind of coldness that is in some ways worse than anger, because it offers nothing. Nothing to fight against.
She told him how coming west had felt like finally being able to breathe at full capacity. She told him about her father, who had been kind and intelligent, and also, in the last years of his life, tired in a way that had nothing to do with age. She told him about the bookkeeping, how she had started it because the family needed the help and had continued it because she was good at it and because there was something about that work that satisfied a part of her that other things left unsatisfied.
She told him about Jarold H., the business partner, and the unspoken understanding that she would marry him and maintain the continuity of the business. And how she had spent two months after her father’s death convincing herself that this was acceptable before finally accepting that it wasn’t.
“Were you afraid?” he asked coming here alone. “Yes,” she said, ” but less afraid than the alternative.” He nodded. ” That’s how I knew I had to leave Missouri,” she said. ” When staying became scarier than leaving.” They returned when the light It was beginning to turn golden and long on the water. He took her hands somewhere near the second aspen grove, and they walked the rest of the way back to town hand in hand, the easy, natural way of people who have been waiting for this for so long that it’s no surprise when it finally happens. He said
goodnight at the gate, and their goodbye was longer than necessary. And when he finally rode home into the winter darkness, she stayed at her window watching the road until she could no longer see it. January was cold and harsh, as January in the Cimeran Valley always was, with snow rolling down from the mountains and settling on the valley floor in long, bluish- white dunes.
Annie worked on her books, and he worked his cattle, and they saw each other on Tuesdays and Sundays and occasionally in the evenings when one of them found a reason to be near the other, which happened more often than either of them had planned. He invited her to the ranch one Tuesday evening for dinner, and she went, and he made a beef stew that It was better than anything she’d eaten since leaving town.
He had a knack for cooking that surprised her, though it probably shouldn’t have. A man who lived alone for seven years either learned to cook or suffered, and Era wasn’t a man inclined to unnecessary suffering. Billy Cruz was there too, the young cowboy, a skinny, jolly boy of Mexican descent who clearly regarded Era with a combination of genuine affection and the mild irreverence of someone who had known a person long enough to find them amusing.
He shook Annie’s hand with great formality and then spent most of dinner asking her questions about the freight business because he was thinking ahead and wondering if there was money in it. She told him what she knew. He listened with the focused attention of someone whose plans were more serious than his worried demeanor suggested.
After dinner, Era walked Annie over to where Dachis was tied up, and they stood in the cold darkness for a while without any hurry. The sky above the valley was vast and thick with stars. “The high desert winter sky was unlike any other sky on earth, so crowded with light that the darkness between the stars seemed secondary, almost incidental.
I need to tell you something,” he said in a tone that suggested it was something he’d been considering for some time. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about spring,” he said, “about how I want the flowers to look. And I keep thinking I’d like to ask you what you think, what you would add or change.” She looked at him.
He looked at the field that was covered in snow and completely invisible in the darkness. Because? She asked. He turned and looked at her in a direct way that she had come to understand meant he was choosing his words carefully because they mattered. “Because I’d like you to feel that a part of it is yours,” he said. “If that’s what you wanted.
” The cold air lingered between them inside the house. Daduas barked at something once and then fell over . “I would like that very much,” she said. He reached out and tucked a lock of hair under her hat where the wind had blown it away. And the gesture was so careful and particular that it felt more intimate than something more theatrical would have been.
” Little blue ones,” she said. My father had an engraving of a Texas landscape with bluebirds. I’ve always wanted to see them grow up. ” They’ll grow up here,” he said. I’ll ask for the seeds. She kissed him then because she wanted to and because she wasn’t a woman who waited for permission.
It was brief and precise, and when she stepped back, he looked at her with an expression that wasn’t one of surprise, but that bordered on astonishment. The way a person looks when something they had wished for turns out to be real. Good evening, she said. Good night, he said . She rode back home through the cold, the vast darkness and the bright stars, and felt so full of something that she wanted to sing, which she almost did, though she held back for the sake of the mare.
February came in strong, with a storm in the first week that dumped two feet of snow in the valley and kept everyone indoors for three days. Anie sat in her room above the grocery store and read by lamplight and thought about spring, the bluebirds, and Arrasn’s face in the darkness by the barn. When the roads were clear, she found a letter waiting for her in the mailbox of her cousin Etna in town, who wrote long, detailed, and slightly dizzying letters, typical of someone who had nothing confidential and wanted to share everything.
Etna informed her that Jarold Hall had sold the grocery store, which didn’t surprise Annie at all, and that the new owner had already raised the prices, which also didn’t surprise anyone. He reported that the town had had its own snowstorm. He reported in a tone of studied disinterest that he was not deceiving anyone, that he had heard through an acquaintance that Annie was doing well in Simeran and that there was a man involved and that he very fervently hoped that Annie would write to him telling him everything. An responded
and told her some things that together probably told Edna most of the things. Land grant problems erupted again at the end of February, which was always the season for them. Winter had a way of sharpening grievances, and by spring everyone was ready to act on what they had spent the cold months ruminating on. There were disputes over fence lines on the east side of the valley and two Settler families received notices that their claims might not be legal under the Maxwell land grant patent .
And there was an unpleasant afternoon in the cantina in which words were exchanged between the legal representatives of the concession claimants and several of the smaller ranchers that could easily have turned into something worse. The land of Era was clear. He had bought it with a title predating the Maxwell period, with papers that had been reviewed twice by two different lawyers at considerable personal expense, because he was the kind of man who understood that in this country, at this time, a piece of paper was the
difference between everything and nothing, but he was concerned about what was happening to his neighbors. “ Morasan is going to lose his place,” he told Annie over coffee at the kitchen table one Sunday. “The grant lawyers have a precedent from Taos County, and their title doesn’t hold up against that.
” “Is there anything that can be done?” she asked. “ He needs a lawyer who knows more about farm law than the one he has. The one from Cimeran is good for wills and simple contracts. This is federal claims court work.” He twirled his coffee cup in his hands. “I’ve been writing to a man in Santa Fe who handles these cases, but it costs money.
” “How much?” He told her the amount. It wasn’t a trivial sum. “You ’re considering paying for it yourself,” she said. He was silent for a moment. “Morrison has three children,” she said. “The youngest was born last spring. They’ve been on that land for six years.” “Can you afford it?” she said. “Not comfortably,” he said. “But yes.
” She looked at him longly. “ Do it,” she said. “Do you think I should?” “ I think a man who plants flowers in dry land to honor his mother’s belief that beauty is a “In need, he’s exactly the kind of man who would also help his neighbor maintain his home,” she said. “And I think you already knew you would.” He went silent again and then said yes, which was an answer to all of that.
The lawyer from Santa Fe arrived in Simeran in March. He was meticulous and capable. And after 2 months of work, Morrison’s claim was deemed defensible under the original territorial provisions. The family kept their land. Morrison arrived at Era’s ranch in May and shook his hand for a long time without saying anything, which was the only kind of thanks he would have accepted.
Spring arrived in the Cimeran Valley, as spring always arrives in the high desert country. Suddenly, with a conviction that almost seems personal. One week the ground was frozen and gray, and then a warm wind came from the south, and in 15 days the poplars were already sprouting, and the stream ran swiftly with the sky, and the world had been reorganized around the promise of green.
The field of flowers at the ranch of anger returned exactly as he had said it would. The larkspurs were the first, pushing through the ground in late March with an urgency that seemed unlikely given the winter they had just survived. In early April they were joined by the Indian brushweed and the echinaceas were already showing their leaves and along the new row, near the eastern fence that I had prepared in November, the first small shoots of blue lupines were pushing their way towards the light.
Annie was there when she found them. He had gone horseback riding on the first Sunday of April, something that was as much a part of his week as bookkeeping and errands on Tuesdays, and they had walked together through the countryside in the morning. When they found the first cluster of blue lupine shoots, small and determined, and unmistakably blue-green, even at that size, she was quiet for a moment.
“There they are,” he said. She bent down and looked at them. They were nothing extraordinary yet, just ordinary seedlings, in the way that all beginnings are ordinary before they cease to be so. But there they were, in that dry valley soil , in the land he had prepared, growing because he had said they would.
She stood up and looked at him, and he was looking at her with that expression she had seen before, the one that wasn’t one of surprise, but was close to astonishment. She took his face in her hands and kissed him properly, this time in broad daylight in the middle of the field of flowers. While Daduas wagged its tail somewhere behind them, the Sangedristo Mountains held the entire valley in their ancient, blue arms .
When she stepped back, he said, “Aie, I know,” she said. He proposed to her in May, on a warm afternoon at the end of the third week of the month, when the blue lupines had fully opened, and the field along the northern fence was the most beautiful thing in the Simeran Valley, which in that season was saying something considerable.
“I hadn’t planned the timing to coincide with the flowers,” he told her later. He had been planning it for a week, and the afternoon he chose just happened to be the afternoon when the blue lupines reached their peak. She chose to believe it partly because it was probably true and partly because, even if it wasn’t , she appreciated the poetry in it.
They were sitting on the porch after dinner. It had become a regular habit. They had dinner at the ranch on Friday nights, which Billy Cruz had adapted to with the adaptability of young people and which Douglas wholeheartedly approved of. And the light of the setting sun was doing what it does in late May in New Mexico, becoming long, amber, and almost liquid, turning the mountains into copper and the flowers into stained glass.
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a ring, which he held between his fingers in a way that suggested he had been keeping it in that pocket for several days, waiting for the right moment. It was a simple ring, a small garnet set in silver, which she later learned she had bought from a silversmith in Santa Fe with a letter of description because she hadn’t wanted to take it with her and spoil the surprise.
The garnet was the same orange-red as the Indian brush. “I’ve been thinking about what I want,” he said. “And what I want is to spend my life talking to you about books, about cattle, about the land, about flowers, about the things we read, about the things that happened in the valley, about the things that happened before we arrived and about the things that will happen after. I want you here.
” He paused. I love you, Anie. I think I’ve loved you since you turned your horse around on the road. She looked at the ring and then at him, and her eyes were bright, but her voice was firm because she was Annie Horn and she had been firm in more difficult times than this. ” I love you too,” he said.
I think I loved you when you said a home that had nothing beautiful and wasn’t finished yet. That’s a yes. “That’s a resounding yes,” she said. He placed the ring on her finger and she gazed at it in the light of the setting sun and the garnet shone like an ember, the flowers moving in the warm breeze around it .
And Dadas laid his head on her knee with the satisfaction of a dog who has decided that the new arrangement is satisfactory. They were married in June in the small church of Cimaran, on a morning so clear that the mountain seemed close enough to touch. Annie wore her best blue dress, which wasn’t white, but was beautiful, and carried a posy of wildflowers, Indian brushwood, larkspur, and some of the last of the blue lupines that were already past their prime, but had clung on as if they knew they needed them.
He donned his best jacket and a new hat that Billy Cruz had insisted on buying for the occasion and stood in front of the church with the peculiar stillness of a man who is exactly where he wants to be. Martha Andr cried. I had been predicting this wedding since October and had the satisfied air of someone whose predictions have been completely vindicated.
Calendris shook his hand for a long time. Billy Cruz, acting as a sort of unofficial witness and general celebrant, stood on the front bench and smiled with the uncomplicated happiness of someone who is 19 years old and has not yet learned to be reserved about good things. The Morrison family arrived, all five of them, the three children well-groomed and formal, wearing clothes that had clearly been ironed for the occasion.
Morrison brought a jar of honey from his own hives, which he placed in Annie’s hands with a seriousness that made her throat tighten. There were other faces she recognized from the months she had spent in the valley, the people who had come to the dances and dinners, who had waved to her from the wagons on the road, who had done business with Hendr and Sutton and had become part of the fabric of her life there.
The valley wasn’t a big community, but it was real and now it was theirs in a way that went beyond work and the room above the grocery store. The preacher, a taciturn and dry-humored man named Reverend Pique, who had been in the valley since the early 1970s, officiated the ceremony with an efficiency that, nevertheless, managed to feel sincere.
When he asked if anyone objected, the silence in the room was of a kind that felt genuinely enthusiastic, rather than merely unquestionable. When he finished, he took her face in his hands and kissed her. And the church erupted in the particular kind of noise that village weddings produce. Half formal approval, half the overflowing pleasure of people who have been watching two people dance around each other for months and are deeply relieved to see them finally make up their minds.
He moved his things to the ranch that same week. It took him two trips in the Enris’ wagon. His trunk, his books, his father’s photograph , his account books, a box of personal items that included, somewhat inexplicably, four jars of dried beans that he had stored in his room in anticipation of some imagined future need. Ala helped carry everything without commenting on the beans.
He continued working for Chanres for the first year, riding his horse into town on weekdays, which was a perfectly practical arrangement. Coo had offered her the job of working from the ranch some days, sending manifests and figures by mail, and she accepted three days a week. It was a modern arrangement, she thought.
modern in the particular way that necessity makes things modern, because it was simply more efficient than traveling 20 minutes to the village and 20 minutes back every day. The house felt different with her inside. He had not made a dramatic reorganization. She was not a woman who remodeled spaces that others had inhabited without consulting them.
But small things changed. A blue plaid curtain appeared in the bedroom window that she had found at the grocery store, and she liked the way it looked. Her books joined his on the shelf. The jar of dried knight’s spurs on the windowsill was accompanied by a small framed print that he had brought from the village.
Not the one with the blue lupines of Texas, which had belonged to his father and gone with the store, but a similar landscape, green and generous, which he had found in a store in Simeran. He observed these changes with a quiet pleasure that he expressed mainly in the way he moved around the house with a new ease, as if the space had finally agreed with him.
They also argued because they were both people with opinions, and because the ordinary work of sharing a life involves constant small negotiations that can occasionally turn into big ones. They argued about the money once in August, when Annie thought they should reinvest some of the profits from summer cattle in fence improvements instead of keeping the reserve in cash.
Ila thought the cash reserve was more important given the unpredictability of the New Mexico weather. She presented her case with numbers, and he, with 7 years of experience in the Valley, and they spent three days in a state of polite disagreement until Annie reviewed his analysis with some data she had extracted from Hendris’s drought records and concluded that he was probably right about the cash reserve, and so she told him.
And he said that his point about the fences would have merit in the spring when they knew what the water situation was. And they shook hands at the kitchen table with a solemnity that later made them both laugh. Billy Cruz, who had been present at this exchange, reported it to his mother as proof that they were the most sensible married couple in the valley, which reached the ears of Martha Hr, who vigorously agreed.
Summer passed them by. The afternoon storms, working with the cattle, the flower fields reaching their peak in July, the long golden afternoons on the porch with coffee and books in comfortable silence. Annie learned the ranch the same way she had learned the freight books, systematically, looking at everything, understanding the relationships between things.
He learned which pastures retained moisture longer, which stretches of fence tested the horses more persistently, which horses tended to be difficult in the mornings, and which ones were reliable from the first step. He also began to keep a second record, not the official ranch accounts that he had taken and systematized during the first month, but a personal observation journal that he wrote every night.
the state of the countryside, what was blooming, what needed attention, notes from his readings, observations about the valley and the people in it. It wasn’t a diary in the romantic sense, but it was a record of a life lived to the fullest, and she valued it accordingly. In September she told him she was pregnant.
He told her in the kitchen after dinner, directly, in the way she usually used to give important information, without excessive preamble. He processed it for a moment, and then his face did something she had never fully seen before. He simply opened up completely, without any of the careful arrangements he used to maintain between himself and the world.
It was a face of pure, unreserved happiness, and it was the most beautiful thing she had seen in a human being since she herself had turned her horse around on the road through the valley. He walked around the table and hugged her, and she felt his warmth and his solid reality, and thought, not for the first time, that what she had been most afraid of giving someone that kind of power in her life was also what made her feel most completely herself. “A spring baby,” he said.
“Late May, I think.” “The flowers will be open,” he said. “Of course they will be,” she said. The winter of 1878 and into 1879 was the happiest winter Annie Hon. Anagna had ever known. Although Houson kept it for his professional work with Hendris, it would never have happened. The ranch was warm against the cold in the way that well- built places are warm, with thick walls, a good fireplace, and the particular quality of heat that comes from a wood-burning stove that has been reliably burning for years. He
continued his bookkeeping work from home most days, going to Simaran on horseback two days a week. He read more than he had read in years. He planted an extension of the kitchen garden in November with the intention of having it ready for spring. A was present in the way she had known from the beginning he would be , not lurking, not paying feigned attention, but genuinely there.
He would bring it to her in the mornings when she was tired from the pregnancy, without ceremony, simply because he had prepared it and she would want it. He would ask about the books and listen to the answer. She would read to him at night from whatever he was reading on the shelf, and she would read to him from her own books, and they would have long discussions about things they disagreed with, things they found beautiful, and things that made them angry about the world.
They were talking about the problems with Grant that had never been fully resolved. They talked about what was happening to the Apache people in the territory, a topic Annie addressed with the candor of someone who had grown up in a village and understood the history, the broken treaties, the forced relocations, the systematic elimination of a way of life that had been established there for centuries before some settler pulled a wagon west.
She had met Apache families in town, had done business with them, and was not willing to talk about them as abstractions. A listened and agreed and added her own observations from years in the valley, and they were two people who saw injustice clearly and named it as such, which was not a universal quality in the Cimeran Valley in 1879, but it was, she thought, a necessary one.
Billy Cruz had an altercation with a man named Arquer from the West Side of the County in January, a dispute over the sale of a horse that had gone wrong, and spent a week patiently mediating until a resolution was reached that left both men unsatisfied enough to be fair. Billy came to the ranch for dinner the following Sunday with the learned expression of someone who had learned something.
Annie fed him and told him directly that the next time someone was about to scam him in the sale of a horse, he should bring the papers to her first because she would find the problem in 30 minutes. Yes, ma’am, said P sincerely. ” And stop calling me ‘ma’am,'” she said, “you’ve only known me for eight months.
” Yes, he said. His son was born on May 28, 1879, at the Ranch House, attended by Simeran’s doctor and assisted by Martha Hras, who had appointed herself to that position without being asked and could not have been more helpful had she had professional training. A was outside during the worst of the delivery, which was traditional and also clearly painful for him, in a way that Marta later described to Annie with some affection.
I had looked out the window once during a difficult hour and had seen him sitting on the porch step with his hands in his hair. But when it was all over and everything was alright, Marta let him in and he went over to the bed and saw his son for the first time and he looked exactly as Annie had hoped he would look. He completely discarded it.
They named him James after Annie’s father. James Daniel Sud. The Daniel part wasn’t after anyone in particular, just because it was a good name and they liked how the two sounded together. He was a healthy, noisy, and demanding baby in the specific way that babies who have decided that the world should revolve around their needs do, something that Annie found rather amusing than difficult, because her father had told her that she had been exactly the same.
“You deserve it,” he said when she mentioned this. “I accept it,” she said. The field of flowers was in full bloom the week James was born. The first day Annie felt well enough to go out, he took her to see him. Well, he accompanied her because she could walk, but he still couldn’t stay away and they stood at the edge of the field with the baby in his arms.
And the larkspur, the brushwood, and the horsetails were in all their splendor, and the blue lupines, now in their second year and stretching along the eastern fence, had returned stronger than before. ” What do you think?” he said to James, who at that moment could not think of anything more complex than the imminent possibility of food.
“She finds it extraordinary,” Anie said. ” I think so too,” he said, and looked at her, and she knew he wasn’t talking about the flowers. The months that followed were the full, complex, and exhausting months of new parenthood, which Annie navigated with the same systematic intelligence she applied to accounting books.
He found rhythms. She found, to her own surprise, that she was not bothered by the interruptions, the mess, and the constant physical demands of a small person who needed her specifically, not as a concept, but as a real body in the room. This had worried her, worried that her love of order and solitude made her ill-suited to both the needs of an infant.
But James was simply too real and too particular for her to relate to him as an abstraction. And she discovered that she loved him in the same direct and practical way that she loved her father, not by representing him, not by narrating him, but simply by accumulating presence and attention daily. A was a father in the same way he was everything else, quiet, constant, reliable in the specific gravity of his presence.
He would take turns waking up at night whenever Annie needed him, without being asked. He carried James all over the ranch from very early in the morning, in the manner of a man who thinks that a child should know what his home is like. By the time James was 4 months old, he had already been in the flower field, in the stable, in the southern pasture and on every fence line of the property, carried in his father’s arms, and had been told with terse and honest ears what each thing was and why it mattered.
Annie felt something she couldn’t put a word for, and she thought it was probably that specific kind of love that arises when you see someone who wants to be exactly as you hoped they would be. The year 1880 brought changes to the valley that had been brewing for some time. The Ax, Tepique and Santa Fe railroad reached Cimera that year, which changed the economy of the entire area almost overnight.
Calendry adapted by diverting its freight routes to longer journeys that the railway could not compete with, and needed Annie’s books more than ever during the transition period. She worked more than in years. reorganizing the entire route structure and helping Cal navigate the new competitive landscape with the methodical pleasure of someone facing a complex problem.
The valley changed too. New people arrived with the railroad: merchants, speculators, a second doctor, and a lawyer who established a real practice instead of the informal consultations that had passed for legal services before. The problems with land grants began to slowly diminish, not because full justice had been done , but because the practical realities of the land were settling into a new arrangement that, while not perfect, was at least stable. Morrison kept his lands.
The Delgado property was purchased by a Colorado family who rebuilt the house and planted an apple orchard. He sold cattle to buyers he had never been able to reach before because the railway made transport possible where it was not before. The ranch grew. He bought another 40 acres at the far north end that had good water from a small spring, and he and Belly Cruz spent much of the spring building fences and a new feedlot .
Billy Cruz had become a man that year. He was 21 now and had taken Anie’s advice about horses to heart and had a reputation in the Valley for being fair in business, which was more valuable than almost any other reputation a young man could have. He had also developed a very obvious interest in a young woman named Rosa Delgado, with no connection to the burned property, just a coincidence of surname.
who was the niece of Simeran’s teacher and who seemed to find Pelly’s enthusiastic character completely appealing. Annie watched this development with the possessive delight of someone who had recently been in that exact situation and retained all the relevant information about it. “You should invite her to the July dance,” he told Pelly over dinner one evening.
“That’s what I plan to do,” he said with dignity. “ You’ve been planning this for three Sundays,” she said. “Ugh,” he said without looking up from his coffee. “I should ask her,” Annie said. “He knows,” she said. Billy invited Rosa Delgado to the July dance. She accepted. They danced together all night, and by August everyone in the valley accepted them as a couple, which was the Cimeran Valley’s version of a formal announcement.
Annie considered this a satisfactory outcome. James took his first steps in September 1880 in the kitchen, between the table leg and his mother’s outstretched hands, with the intense, wobbly concentration of someone attempting something that remains entirely theoretical until the moment it ceases to be so.
He took three steps. Then he sat down firmly on the wooden floor with a thud that made Dogas raise his head in mild concern. Then he smiled at Annie with the beaming satisfaction of a conquest completed. Three steps. He shouted toward the back of the house, where he was washing up after work in the stable. He appeared in the kitchen doorway 30 seconds later.
Which was impressive given the distance. She bent down and held out her hands to James. And James stood up again with great determination and this time took four steps before sitting down. “ There he is, ” A said, and lifted him up and held him with outstretched arms, something James received as the honor it clearly was.
Daniel watched them, her husband holding their son in the afternoon light from the kitchen, the mountains visible through the window, the smell of dinner on the stove, and the crisp, clean scent of the approaching autumn. And she thought about the drive through the valley and the color that had stopped her horse in its tracks and the impulse that had made her turn around without knowing why.
She thought about the fact that she had almost driven past. The thought gave her something like vertigo—not regret, because she hadn’t driven past, but the retrospective dizziness of a narrowly avoided loss. “What?” A said, because he had learned to read her face with the accuracy of a man who has been paying close attention for almost two years. “Nothing,” she said.
“I was just thinking in the flowers.” He looked at her for a moment. “Come on, tell me,” she said, and sat down at the kitchen table with James on her knee. And she sat down opposite him and told him what she had been thinking. Everything: the journey, the vertigo, and the near-failure to turn around . He listened as he always listened, without interrupting at all.
When she finished, she said, “I saw you from the stable.” She stared at him. “What? I saw you coming,” he said. “The first time I saw you stop and sit for a while, then write again, and then turn around.” He looked down at James, who was engrossed in a shirt button. I didn’t know who you were. I only saw you turn around.
“You never told me that,” she said. “I thought you knew,” he said. And after a while, it seemed to me that it was something that should be told at the right time. “When is the right time?” she said. “I think now,” he said. She reached across the table and took his hand. And James looked up from the button with the slightly imperious expression of a child who has been temporarily deprioritized.
Wad got up from under the table and put his head in the space between their clasped hands in the hopeful way of a dog who suspects something good is happening and would like to be included. The light of the setting sun streamed through the blue plaid curtains and spread across the kitchen table in long, warm bars.
And outside the window, the mountains were turning amber in the last hour of the September sun, and the field of wildflowers had passed its bloom for the year, but still stood, the dry stems moving in the gentle breeze. He thought of his father, who had said that the hardest thing in life wasn’t work. or the difficulties, but learning to allow herself to have the good things.
She thought she had been right. She thought she had finally learned it. “Tell me again,” she said. “I saw you turn around, ” she said, and I thought, “I hope whoever it is has a reason for stopping.” She looked at this man who had planted flowers in dry soil, who had walked her home from dances and changed her supply days and paid a lawyer for a neighbor’s children and stored dried spurs on her windowsill through the winter, and she thought the reasons he had stopped were endless and specific and it would take her the rest of her
life to list them, and that this was exactly how she wanted to spend it. ” He had a reason,” she said. The following spring, 1881, the Bluevonets returned for the third year in a row and this time they had spread along the entire length of the east fence, a solid blue-violet ribbon that in the right morning light made the fence appear to float on a shallow tide.
She photographed it not with a camera, since there was no photographer in Cimera that week, but with words in her nightly diary, with the specific and loving precision of someone who makes a record of something she wants to be sure of remembering. The field was more elaborate than ever. A had added sweet clover the previous autumn, which was sprouting in dense, fragrant patches among the other plantings, and Billy Cruz had brought sign seeds from the plains of a trading post near Talos, which were just beginning to show their shy
faces along the southern row. The people in the valley had stopped commenting on the flowers with confusion and now commented on them with a kind of possessive pride. They were a point of reference. The riders used the Subton flower field as a directional reference. Pass the flower ranch, turn north at the big poplar, and in the summer months it was not uncommon to find a family stopped in the road looking.
One afternoon in June, Annie was working in the kitchen garden when she heard the duchess neigh from the farmyard and looked up to see a woman on a gray horse stopped in the road, looking at the field of flowers with an expression that Annie fully recognized because it was the expression she had worn on the same road almost three years before.
The woman sat there for a long time, then seemed to compose herself and continued on her way. Ani watched her walk away and smiled. He went back to his beans. The second baby arrived in November 1882. A girl this time, born on a clear, cold morning, when the first snow of the season had fallen overnight and the world was white and still outside the bedroom window.
She was smaller than James at birth, but she compensated for this with lung power, arriving in the world with an opinion on which she communicated at a considerable volume. They called her Rose, of course. Rose’s gesture wasn’t for anyone in particular, but because she had ordered the first climbing roses from a nursery catalog in Santa Fe and planned to train them along the porch railing in the spring, and it seemed only right to honor him.
James, who was 3 and a half years old and had recently become deeply involved in the idea that the world should consult him before making any significant changes. Initially I wasn’t sure about Clara. He inspected her with the concentrated suspicion of someone whose experience with siblings was theoretical. Then she grabbed his finger, which she did with the reflexive gripping strength of a newborn who doesn’t yet know he has fingers.
And James looked at her with an expression that changed in real time from suspicion to consideration and from consideration to something that was unmistakably done. “Mine,” James Aa said, pointing at Clara. ” Yes,” said James, “she’s my sister.” “She’s your sister,” James repeated with more satisfaction.
” Technically, she belongs to herself,” Annie said from the bed. Yes, he said, but for now we share. James accepted this with the magnanimity of a great landowner acknowledging a small territorial arrangement. The ranch was full now, in the way that houses get full when they are completely inhabited.
The kitchen was always warm. The bookshelf had been extended to include a second shelf. The climbing roses planted in the spring before Clara was born were beginning to take hold on the porch railing, their stems green and reaching. Billy Cruz came to dinner most Sundays and Rosa Delgado, who had said yes to his proposal in February and had married him in May, came with him.
And Sunday lunches were long and noisy and filled with the ongoing argument between Belle and Guia about cattle prices and between Annie and Rosa about the best way of preserving, which was an argument that neither of them intended to resolve because the process of having it was too pleasant. Douglas, who was already old by the standards of his breed, moved more slowly and slept more deeply, but remained entirely the same in essential qualities.
Equanimity, cheerful vigilance of the courtyard, reliable identification of visitors who meant good versus those who required vigilance. He had accepted Clara with the same equanimity he had extended to James, carefully sniffing her the first night she came home. and then appointing himself to sleep in a specific place in the hallway between the bedroom and the rest of the house.
Calendris had substantially grown the freight company with the reorganization of the railroad, and Annie’s role had evolved over the years from bookkeeper to something more like a business partner in all but formal designation. He worked three days a week, now from the ranch and one day in town, and the system of manifests and accounting books that he had built in those early months had become the operational backbone of the entire business.
Marta Hendris said at one of the Sunday dinners in the spring of 1883 that añe was the smartest business mind in the valley, which she said in a tone of complete sincerity that also contained a mild rebuke to all those who had not realized it before. “You’re not wrong,” said Cal. “I know I’m not wrong,” said Marta.
He refilled everyone’s coffee and said nothing, but the expression on his face was the one Annie knew best of all his expressions. The quiet, unwavering pride of a man who is surrounded by people he loves and who are exactly as he has always known them. In the summer of 1883, a surveyor passed through the valley mapping the extent of the new county road.
He stopped at the ranch to ask for directions and ended up staying for lunch because Annie insisted and because it became clear in the conversation that he had just arrived from the northeast corner of the Valley, where the disputed land east of Morrison’s property had finally been legally settled in favor of the settlers.
“Then it’s settled,” Annie said. “Filed with the county records last week,” the surveyor said. “The concession claim was dismissed at the federal level. It takes a while to get to places like this, but yes, settled.” Anie caught Aro’s eye across the table, and they held each other’s gaze for a moment, the peculiar way two people share a story, a fragment of information exchanged.
After the surveyor left, she walked toward the flower field, which was in full bloom, everything in full bloom at once in the peculiar way Julio sometimes allowed. Larkspur, brushstrokes, coneflowers, blobonets, sweet clover, and those that had now fully settled in brilliant shades of orange and red along the south row.
She walked slowly along the north fence and felt the afternoon sun on her face and the warm, fragrant air the flowers generated in their collective abundance. And she thought about all the things that had grown in this land. She heard him approaching from behind and leaned back slightly, and he put his arm around her, and they stood together in the field, looking at the valley.
Morasan rode by yesterday, he said. He brought another jar of honey. He always brings honey, she said. He knows I do n’t have any bees, she said. I think he does it on purpose, he said. Of course he does it on purpose, she said. It’s the one specific thing he can give. He waited a moment in silence. Then he said, “Do you ever think about where you would be if you hadn’t stopped?” He said, “Less than before,” she said.
” What do you think?” “I think I would have kept going,” she said, “and then eventually I would have found a reason to turn around somewhere else, and it would have been something minor, and I wouldn’t have known what I’d missed because I wouldn’t have known what was here.” She turned to look at him, but I stopped and turned around, and this is here.
He looked at her with his whole face, which was still the face she had first seen beside a woodpile, weather-beaten, steady, with those grayish-green eyes that belonged to the color of this particular valley, but which had accumulated, in the years she had known him, a richness that went beyond the weather And age was passing, and he was entering something that was totally him, totally known, totally loved.
“I’m glad you stopped,” he said. “I know,” she said. “Me too.” They walked back to the house together through the twilight, through the scent of flowers and dry earth and the particular mountain air of the Cimeran Valley, past the stable where Pelly’s horse was tied up and where Douglas had settled into a patch of sun on the porch, and through the door of their home, where James was playing on the floor with a collection of wooden animals he had made the previous winter.
And Clara was asleep in her crib, and the kitchen was warm and smelled of supper, and everything in it was real and present and exactly where it belonged. The years that followed built upon those years as good things do, not in sudden transformations, but in steady accumulation, each season adding to the one before, each year leaving room and the people in it a little more of themselves.
The climbing roses on the porch railing first blossomed in the spring of 1884. A deep crimson that Annie hadn’t quite expected and which she considered exactly right. They were photographed that summer when a traveling photographer passed through Simeran. Annie was on the porch in front of the roses.
James stood beside his father with the earnest dignity of a five-year-old who had been told to sit still, and clear in his mother’s arms , utterly unconcerned by the occasion. Annie kept the photograph in a small frame on the kitchen windowsill next to the jar of dried ladspurs. James, as he grew up, was his mother’s son in his intelligence and outspokenness and his father’s son in his quietness and patience.
And the combination produced a child who was formidable to argue with, but completely pleasant to be around. He developed a fascination with the mechanics of things: fences, wells, the rigging of the water system that had been improved the year James turned seven. Annie taught him what she knew with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who She understood that good teaching couldn’t be rushed.
Clara was different. She was warm, boisterous, and sociable in a way that reminded her of Annie, but with a particular gentleness that was entirely her own. She wanted to meet everyone. She wanted to talk to the Morrison children, to Billy Cruz’s youngest, and to the new teacher who had arrived from Kansas in 1885.
She brought home stray animals with a conviction that was non-negotiable. When he was four, Douglas had been joined by a three-legged date of indeterminate origin that Clara called General and a large brown rabbit that lived in the barn and was called Senator. Dagas died in the fall of 1885, quietly in his place in the hallway, old and seemingly content.
Annie buried him under the cottonwood tree by the creek, and everyone attended, and Annie placed a handful of dried larkspurs on the small mound of earth. And James was stoic with the controlled sadness of a six-year-old who has decided that dignity is required. And Clara wept with the complete unconsciousness of a 3-year-old girl for whom feeling things fully is simply the only option.
They got a new dog the following spring, a young black dog that Billy Cruz brought from a litter on Morrison’s property. James named him Lenken, which was a political statement that shocked everyone, but it was also, they had to admit, a good name. By the time the decade reached 1890, the ranch had grown to 500 acres with a herd of 350 head and a permanent assistant hired alongside Belly, who now had her own little cottage at the south end of the property, where she lived with Rosa and their two children. The
flower field had become something truly remarkable. Visitors from the valley sometimes wrote specifically to see it, and Simmeran’s newspaper had run a short article the previous spring calling it the most singular and beautiful site in Defax County. C read that with the particular expression of a man who is pleased but would not have sought attention.
Yani read it with the particular expression of a woman who thought it was both accurate and Late. They were both now in their mid-thirties, and the years had treated them the way an active life outdoors and good company often does: with the honesty of some aging and the grace of continued health. He had gray hairs at his temples.
She had small wrinkles at the corners of her eyes that didn’t bother her because they were the lines of a face that had laughed and squinted at the sun. And both were true of their lives. They had n’t stopped talking, hadn’t stopped finding each other interesting, which they both privately considered the greatest luxury of their life together, more than land, cattle, or even flowers.
One Sunday in June of that year, they were sitting on the porch after dinner, a dinner that had included 11-year-old James, who was already talking about engineering with a seriousness that Cohanrex said reminded him of Annie at the same age, and 7-year-old Clara, who had asked 11 questions at dinner and showed no sign of slowing down.
And the daylight was lengthening. Over the valley, the flower field was in full bloom, the climbing roses were red against the weathered wood of the porch, and the mountains held it all in their permanent, patient embrace. “Are you happy?” he said. He asked it the way he asked the most important things, simply, directly, without preamble.
She looked at him for a long moment. She thought of the road through the valley and the color that had stopped a horse in its tracks. And a man with an axe who had said that a house without beauty was not yet finished. She thought of the ring that matched the Indian flower and the blues in her second year and the kitchen table in the November light and the coffee that was always strong and the years that had been built from the ordinary materials of days of work and arguments, laughter and the smell of this earth and the weight of this
particular life, fully lived. She thought of James running between the rows of flowers and Clara bringing home animals that needed homes and Len the dog sleeping in the hall where Douglas and Pely had slept Cruz and Rosa at Sunday lunches and Martha Hrex being right about everything. And Cal Hrex being honest about what he paid.
He thought of his father, who had said that the hardest thing was learning to allow yourself to have the good things. He had allowed himself to have the good things. Yes, he said, more than I knew was possible when I turned around with my horse on that road. He reached across the porch railing and took hers, and they sat in the long summer afternoon with the sound of the wind through the flowers, the distant murmur of cattle, and the closer sound of their children’s voices from inside the house.
And the mountains did what they always did, hold the valley in their vast, impartial arms, patient and sure as the seasons themselves. The field of flowers moved with the warm June air. Every color was present. Nothing was finished yet because the roots were still there. Because things that go dormant are not dead, only waiting.
Because a house that had nothing beautiful in it was not finished yet. And this, this In particular, built on dry land by a man with seeds and a woman with the good sense to turn her horse, it was the most finished thing either of them had ever seen. It would continue to grow. The seeds were already in the ground.
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