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  • Chapter 14 – What Grows Slow

    The basil had leaves. Gerald crouched at the end of the row and looked at them. Two small lobes, pale green, each one no wider than his smallest fingernail. They stood on a stem so thin that a water drop would bend it flat against the soil. The lobes were spread open, turned toward the

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  • Journal Entry 2026-03-15

    Wow. I didn’t realize how long it’s been since I did anything with the website. Well today I hooked it up to Obsidian so I can post notes there and have them become blog entries on the site. I’ll also be posting some recent writing work I’ve been doing and a new series: The Life

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  • Cracked Drywall

    The realtor said the house had good bones. She said this while standing in the kitchen, one hand on the laminate counter, the other gesturing at crown molding that had been painted over so many times it had lost its edges. She said it with the particular brightness of someone who’d been showing the same

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  • Chapter 13 – Millie and the Narrow Woods

    Gerald was at the gate when Millie came across the yard. He had finished the morning circuit — chickens, woodbox, hall — and watered the basil row before Sable arrived. The soil was dark where he had poured. The greenhouse had held the night’s warmth in its panels and the air inside was thick and

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  • Chapter 12 – Sand Day

    Pim woke him in the dark. Not with a shake or a call. Gerald opened his eyes to the sound of boots on the stairs — two careful steps, a pause, then the creak of his bedroom door swinging just wide enough for a voice to reach the bed. “Wagon in twenty minutes. Dress warm.”

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  • Chapter 11 – Rainy Afternoon

    The rain came in sideways and stayed. It had started during the morning circuit — a scatter of drops on the greenhouse panels that thickened while Gerald poured, the sound growing from a tap to a drum to something that swallowed the dripping condensation and the creak of the stakes and everything else. By the

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  • Chapter 10 – The Argument

    Gerald had been circling it for three days. Not the greenhouse. The greenhouse was where his body went every morning — through the heavy door that stuck on the humidity, across the flagstones to the barrel, can filled, circuit begun. His hands did what his hands had learned to do: pour close on the herbs,

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  • Chapter 09 – Dirt Under His Nails

    Gerald’s basil row did not forgive quickly. Three mornings after the drowning, the replanted seeds had not shown. The soil was dark where he had turned it, darker than the beds on either side, and each morning Gerald knelt beside the row before the circuit, looking for the pale curve of a stem breaking the

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  • Guardian Angels

    The field had been a hayfield once. You could tell from the stubble poking through the mud where the tires hadn’t ground it flat. Thirty, maybe forty cars and trucks nosed into rough rows between the tree line and a barn that leaned about ten degrees past optimistic. Most of the vehicles were domestics —

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  • Chapter 08 – Under Glass

    The greenhouse was a different kind of warm. Gerald had been through it before — carrying herbs for Mary, fetching an empty pot Nessa needed, once helping Sable move a tray of seedlings from one bench to another while Mam propped the door. He had passed through it on his way to somewhere else, a

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