Tears pricked Meryl’s eyes. The journal had given her an insight into the woman Hilda was, and perhaps inspiration too. To become that woman. To paint walls, set down roots, and stop moving forward.
Not that she wanted to stagnate. But moving forward did not always have to mean moving house.
A knock sounded at the door.
Meryl startled, setting the journal aside before wiping quickly at her face.
When she opened the door, Frank Grayson stood on the porch with a bottle of red wine in one hand and a pair of old secateurs in the other.
“Well,” he said, taking in her expression with one quick glance and the tact not to mention it, “either I’ve come at a bad time or an excellent one.”
Meryl let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I’m not sure which.”
“Good. Then I’m not intruding too badly.” He lifted the bottle a little. “Brought this because Hilda always kept one tucked away for emergencies.” Then he held up the secateurs. “And these because that rose by the gate is about to swallow the path whole.”
Meryl felt some of the tightness leave her chest.
“Come in,” she said.
Frank stepped inside and glanced at the half-sorted boxes and then at the journal beside them.
“Found some of Hilda’s things?”
Meryl nodded. “I did.”
Frank nodded as if he understood. Then he looked toward the front path and said, “If you’ve got five minutes, I’ll show you how she used to cut that rose back.”
Meryl followed him outside, welcoming the fresh breeze on her face.
The rose bush was even more unruly up close, canes arching across the path in every direction, all wild growth and stubborn thorns. Frank crouched beside it and pressed one weathered hand to the base.
“She always said people were too timid with roses,” he said. “You have to cut them back hard.”
“Sounds brutal.”
“It looks brutal,” Frank corrected. “But it’s not.”
He showed her where to cut. What to take away. What to leave. How to open the center so that the air could move through it. Meryl worked beside him with the secateurs while he gathered the cuttings into a pile, and before long, the tangle had begun to look less like a problem and more like a plant with shape again.
“She loved this one,” Frank said, straightening. “Stubborn thing. Fussy for the first couple of years, then impossible to stop.”
Meryl looked down at the pile of thorny cuttings. “I found notes about it.”
Frank nodded as if that made perfect sense. “Hilda made notes about everything that mattered.”
When the rose was done, they carried the cuttings around to the back of the cottage and then sat on the porch drinking wine from coffee mugs.
The wine was very good. As she sipped it, she closed her eyes, enjoying the velvety richness. Dark fruit, vanilla, and oak lingered on her tongue.
Frank leaned back and looked out over the garden. “I used to sit out here with her some evenings, enjoying a bottle of Thornberg wine. Mostly in summer. She’d talk about the roses, complain about the deer, as we watched the stars come out.”
Meryl smiled despite herself. “She loved it here, didn’t she?”
Frank chuckled. “She did. Not that she and the house didn’t have disagreements. But for Hilda, it was a labor of love.”
They sat quietly for a minute.
Then Frank said, without looking at her, “Sometimes I think the house chose her just as much as she chose it.”
