“So then I was thinking that there was no reason to assume we had to pay anyone for anything.  I mean, we have produce, chickens, eggs, wool, I spin so that’s yarn, and there is all that food I canned and such, so why not try to barter first?  If I gave a better price on each item to whomever worked for us, then it’d be a savings for them and wouldn’t cost us cash.  It’s a win-win if we find someone willing to work for goods instead of dollars.”

Chad smiled at the eagerness in Willow’s voice.  Ever since the discussion with David, her old bounce and energy seemed to be returning, although slowly.  He wondered at the change in her when there was no change in their situation.  “Lass, I’ve noticed you seem a bit more like your old self these days.  Since nothing has changed around here, I was wondering what happened.”

“I don’t know.  I think maybe I needed to see that I don’t have to do it all by myself.  Just knowing I don’t need to freed me somehow.”

“I was thinking we could put an ad in the Fairbury Gazette.  You write it, and I’ll drop it off on my way to work this afternoon.”

Willow dropped the dish cloth into the sink, dried her hands, grabbed pen and paper and began writing.  He nearly went crazy as she meticulously wrote each word in her perfect and artistic penmanship.  “There.  What do you think?”

Chad read the paper aloud.  “We are a family of four and are looking for part-time house help.  It is our preference to barter food and fiber items in exchange for the work, but will also consider monetary compensation.  Please inquire at Walden Farm or call 555-3525.”

He took the pen and made a few scribbles and adjustments before passing the sheet back to her.  “This is how most people write an ad.”

Willow read the note under her breath.  “We are a family of four and are looking for part-time house help.  It is our preference to barter food and fiber items in exchange for the work, but will also consider monetary compensation. Please inquire at Walden Farm or call 555-3525.”

Her nose wrinkled as she looked at Chad.  “But it’s a grammatical nightmare.  You also removed the possibility of payment.”

“See if anyone will barter first.  If we get no calls this week, then we’ll add that to next week’s.  Why tell them it’s a possibility until we know if we need that possibility or not?”

Willow’s arms slid around her husband’s waist.  “And that is why I married you.  I needed someone to tell me how to live in this crazy world of yours.”

Chad finished his coffee in one gulp and then reached for his coat.  It was time to take Lacy for her ride.  He kissed her temple on his way to the door and then paused as he stepped outside.  “Well, that and you were awfully curious about smooching.  I heard the end of North and South so many-“  He slammed the door quickly before her soggy dishcloth could smack him in the face.

***

The ad came out in Wednesday’s paper.  To Chad and Willow’s great surprise, they had four calls within the hour that the paper was likely delivered.  The next day, two more calls came and then they received a call from Aggie.  After speaking to her for a few minutes, Willow disconnected the call and raced to the barn where Chad was feeding Lacey and the goats.  “Chad!  Aggie just called about the ad—“

“Aggie wants to work here?  Is she nuts?”

Playfully, Willow shoved him and reached up to pat Lacey.  Absently, and much to Chad’s stunned amusement, she stroked the horse’s neck as she continued with her news.  “If you’d let me finish… She said that she has a friend who lives in Ferndale.  Iris…” Willow glanced at the pad of paper in her other hand.  “Landry.  I guess they helped Aggie a lot when she first got the children and moved out to their place.  She said Iris was a wealth of wisdom and a hard worker.  When she saw the ad she called Iris and told her about it and Iris said she’d love to work in exchange for fresh food and yarn!”  Willow hesitated.  “Her only stipulation is that she’d have to bring her son with her.  He’s almost thirteen, though, so he shouldn’t be too loud and rough, should he?”

“What’s wrong with loud and rough?”

Nearly sending Chad into a seizure in trying to keep from reacting, Willow laid her head against the horse and sighed.  “I am not bringing someone out here to make more work.  Loud and rough means babies that don’t sleep.  What’s the point of hiring help if they undo all you gain by hiring them?”

She stepped away from the horse, brushed her hands off on her jeans, and started toward the door talking all the while.  “So what do you think?  Should I call her or not?  I like that she has such a good reference, but that boy…”

“Would you have Aggie out here if Laird or Tavish came with her?”

“Definitely.”

“There’s your answer then.”

“Thank you!  I’ll call her right now before the boys wake up again.”

At the barn door, she turned wide-eyed and stared at Chad and his equine friend.  “Did I just touch that animal?”

“You not only touched her, you stroked her neck and snuggled up against her.”

Willow shuddered visibly.  “This is proof that I need some help.”  She shuddered again blinking very slowly as if trying to gain self-control.  Her eyes narrowed slightly and she glared at Chad.  “You enjoyed that.”

“Just a little, yes.”  He met her icy eyes and sighed.   “Ok, so I barely contained my helpless laughter.  It was pretty funny.”

To his surprise, she retraced her steps until she stood nearly at his shoulder with Chad between her and the horse.  “Do not ever stand by and watch me put myself in a situation like that again.  If I want to cuddle up to that beast, I’ll do it, but it’s very unjust of you to let me do it unknowingly.”

As he watched her leave again, he shook his head and fed Lacy another carrot.  “They talk about no fury like a woman scorned?  Forget it Lace… the real fury comes when they’re scared out of their wits.”

In the house, Willow leaned against the back door, shaking.  She had all sorts of theories as to why horses terrified her as they did, but none of them made sense.  All she knew was that they did and she hated how she lost all sense of logic and reason the moment she was around them.  Weakly she pushed herself away from the door and grabbed her journal.  According to her calculations, she was two weeks behind on her Christmas gifts.  She could get an early start on butchering chickens, or work on gifts.  A glance at the clock told her she had an hour at most.

The sound of Chad’s boots on the back step made her decision for her.  She just couldn’t go back outside in the cold right now.  She sighed.  “More like you can’t stand to go near that animal right now,” she muttered under her breath.

While Chad loaded the wood boxes for the stoves, Willow went upstairs to the craft room and pulled out a box.  She’d work on the boys’ main gift while she and Chad talked.  He might even be able to keep them occupied so she could make some serious progress on it.

“Did you get a hold of the woman—Iris?”

“Oh!  No, I need to call.  Thank you.”

This was a great surprise.  She’d never been forgetful.  Chad started to chalk it up to putting too much pressure on herself until he remembered the horse.  He’d have to ask about that sometime.  Right now, he had a project of his own.  The boys were starting to crawl and they worked constantly to keep the lads away from the stoves and the stairs.  If he could build fences and gates, it’d save a lot of concern.

Several minutes later, she danced into the room and pulled out her box of felt squares.  “She says she can start Monday and thanked me for the opportunity.”

“Did you work out payment?”

“I’m ‘paying’ her twelve dollars an hour.  From her earnings, she’s buying anything we produce that she wants at a 10% discount.  On the first of every month, we’ll settle up.  Either she’ll take more food home to make us even, or I’ll give her cash.”

“Sounds fair.”  He pulled out a fence picket from his pile, spread it on top of a tack cloth, and grabbed his sandpaper.

“What are you doing?”

“Making a fence for the stove.  I thought it might as well be attractive.  I knew you’d never go for a plywood box.”

“I think Mother has something like that up in the attic.  I know there are pictures somewhere of a fence-like thing around this stove and the one in the kitchen.  I don’t think she made one for the upstairs.”

Before she finished talking, Chad was racing up the stairs.  She reached for a cutout of a sun and the letter S and chose a light blue square.  With orange embroidery floss, she carefully stitched the sun to the block.  By the time she finished, she heard the faint cry of, “Eureka!” from the upstairs.

Minutes later, Chad came downstairs with something wrapped in a huge blanket.  “It’s covered in dust.  I thought I’d take it outside and sweep it off there.”

“Is that all of it?”

“No, this is just one side.  It looks like it attaches directly to the wall  I saw several more pieces so I think the kitchen one is up there too.”

While Willow sewed trains, umbrellas, violets, and wagons to block squares, Chad carried down huge sections of fencing to the front porch.  He took a broom out and swept them carefully and then brought them into the kitchen to wipe them down well.  “I thought about hosing them off, but I was afraid they’d just freeze and then melt all over the floor.”

“They would.  I tried that with the hearth tools when I was six.  Mother was very irritated.”

“Honest mistake…”

“Yes, but then I was told not to mess with them in the first place.  I thought I knew more than she did.”

“You were a little stubborn…”

She laughed at his studied air of diplomacy.  “I still am, and you know it.”

As Chad assembled the fences around the stoves, he and Willow made their Thanksgiving plans.  The Tesdalls and Finley parents both had plans with other family members.  They’d also both invited Chad and Willow to join them, but the couple had declined.  They wanted their first Thanksgiving with the boys to be at their own home.

“We could invite Ryder.  I heard him talking to someone on his phone the other day that his parents were going to be gone all weekend.  Apparently they’re going skiing in Aspen for Thanksgiving.”

“They didn’t invite their own son to join them?”  The idea seemed impossible to her.

“Apparently they need ‘us’ time.”

“Translating into ‘You aren’t becoming a high powered professional in a highly successful field, therefore we’ll punish you in the hopes that you’ll feel guilty enough to switch majors before it’s too late.”

The cattiness in Willow’s voice was so out of character, that Chad dropped his screwdriver.  “I can’t believe what I just heard.”

“I know it’s awful, but it’s true.   That poor boy works so hard out there and is doing amazing things.  He’s working on cultivating all new plants—well, old ones really.  He’s trying to turn the entire greenhouse into heirloom plants.  It’s amazing what he can do and his parents refuse to recognize it.”

“And if Lucas or Liam chooses a life like Bill’s in Rockland, will you accept it as equally valid and important as the life you’ve chosen?”

Shock filled Willow’s face making Chad think he’d driven his point home well.  However, her words reminded him, once again, that his wife was not your average woman.  “I can’t believe you’d assume otherwise!  He’s my son!  He lives his own life just as I chose mine.  I didn’t have to stay here.  Mother made it plain, the whole time I was growing up, that the day would come that I’d have to choose whether I wanted to keep my life as it was or change it.  I changed it drastically.”

“You stayed here—“

He should have known, he realized later, that the moment she laid down her sewing with deliberate patience, eyes welling with tears, that he’d dismissed much of what she’d done for him with those three insensitive words.  “Chad, you forget that I am not living my mother’s life.”  She swallowed hard.  “I invited you into my home.  I invited the Varneys, the Allens, and Bill into my life.  I took an isolated farm and made it welcome people who would have been met with a shotgun in my mother’s lifetime.  I added cell phones, laptops, and DVDs to my life.  I increased production of food and expanded our property to accommodate it.  I did that to serve people my mother would never have spoken to.  I got married.  I did the one thing that my mother feared most.  I let a man into our home, willingly.  I let him hold me, love me, and together we became parents– the thing my mother feared only slightly less than men in general.”

Chad started to interrupt, but Willow plowed through his words continuing her own at a slightly higher pitch.  “I confronted my grandfather, learned to pity and then fear my grandmother, and in general, turned my life upside down.”  After another deep breath she stood.  “I very nearly moved to the city and took a job as a children’s clothing designer and store manager, and you can sit there and tell me my life is no different than it was when I was, say, ten years old.  I don’t know whether to laugh, feel hurt, or just insulted.”

Stunned into silence, Chad watched slack-jawed as his wife opened the front door and closed it firmly behind her.  He jumped to follow, but cries of consciousness from the boy’s room stopped him.  If he knew Willow, she was far enough away from the house already to be unable to hear them.  Shoulders slumped, he hurried upstairs to greet his sons.

Liam clapped happily in the crib at the sight of Chad, but Lucas slept through the noise his brother made without stirring.  Even when Liam fell over, his head landing on Lucas’ feet, the baby didn’t move.  Alarmed, Chad placed his hand on the boy’s back and sighed with relief as he felt the rise and fall of the little boy’s chest.  He moved his hand to the lad’s forehead, but Lucas was as comfortably warm as any baby should be and not a smidge more.

As he grabbed the ‘diaper basket’ and hurried to their bedroom to change a soggy Liam, Chad realized his own life was vastly different than he’d intended as well.  By now, he’d planned to be expecting a move to the Rockland police force if not on it already.  Instead, he was in an old farmhouse, sans electricity, diapering a child with what Willow insisted on calling “washable” diapers as opposed to “disposable”, and milking six goats every morning.  Just as he dumped the soggy diaper into the pail in the bathroom, another thought hit him.  He was also living his dream of being a police officer.  His dream had expanded and changed to suit new dreams—much like Willow.

Liam sucked contentedly on his bottle as Chad dialed the Allen’s home.  Even as he did it, he realized the irony of choosing to bring in the Allens for help instead of calling his mother or the Finleys.  What had seemed like such an affront at one time, was his first reaction.  Would he ever learn the kind of wisdom and discernment that his father seemed to exude naturally?

Lucas awoke the moment Chad saw the Allen’s car coming up the drive.  He opened the front door, despite the frigid temperatures, and hurried upstairs to grab his other son.  Liam tried to escape their bedroom as Chad changed another soggy diaper until he finally shut the door in the adventuresome tyke’s face.  “You stay in here.  The last thing I need is you falling down the stairs.  That wouldn’t go over very well.

The sound of Lily calling him sent Chad into a rushed frenzy of snaps, soakers, and a fresh pair of sweat pants that did not match the carefully tailored striped shirt Lucas had been wearing with the funny overalls that Willow always made.  With a boy in each arm, giggling and laughing as they played their private games with each other, he hurried to greet Lily and Tabitha.  “Thanks for coming out.  I really blew it this time and we need to talk.”

“Everyone has those moments in their marriage, Chad.  That is something you both have to learn and deal with.”

Passing the boys to his rescuers, Chad grabbed his jacket.  “Thanks Lily.  I’ll be back in a while.”

“Chad?”

He popped his head back in the door, “Yeah?”

“I don’t know what the problem is, but I just thought of something on my way over.”

“What was that?”

Lily snuggled with Liam for a second and then pointed to the huge barn behind the house and the vehicles out front.  “In less than three years, her life has turned upside down.  For twenty-two years she lived one way and now she’s living another.  On top of mothering responsibilities, it’s probably all hitting her at once.”

Chad nodded and shut the door behind him.  “Looks like everyone has realized that but me,” he murmured under his breath as he pulled his collar up around his neck and started looking for footsteps.