Where Lilacs Still Bloom Read Online Free Page A

apron, then with anticipation, bit in.
    Crisp as thin ice on a spring morning! “Frank!” I shouted, nearly spilling off the ladder. “Come here. I think I’ve got it!”
    “Got what?” he shouted back. I watched him step back off his ladder.
    “Just come.” I scrambled down, lifting my skirts. On the way I grabbed two more apples, then three more cradled in my apron. “Here.” I gave each child and Frank an apple. “Bite into it.” I grinned.
    “Tart,” Lizzie, our oldest said. “But good.”
    “Good,” Frank said. Fritz nodded agreement, and Delia and Martha rolled their eyes with pleasure as they chewed.
    “Tart, yes. And big. And now the test.” I took my knife out and began to peel the apple I’d bitten into. I managed a long, slender peel instead of the dozens of small, broken bits of skin that I was used to. “Would you look at that?” I held up the length of peel that wiggled its way into an S. “I’ve got my crisp, bigger, easier peeler. Right here in Papa’s orchard!” I danced a little jig.
    “Glad a good apple makes your day,” Frank said.
    “Don’t you see? I bred these, Frank. Papa and I graftedthem. A Wild Bismarck and a Wolf River variety, and now I have the best of both in one fruit. Oh, I can hardly wait to make you a pie.”
    “You grafted these?” Frank raised an eyebrow.
    “I did, and I’ve been waiting these long years to get what I wanted.”
    “Why didn’t you say?” Martha, our youngest girl, asked. She’s fourteen, and she sounded hurt.
    “Oh, it was just an experiment. If it didn’t work out, I didn’t want to bother you all. I had no idea it might actually work.”
    “But you look so … happy,” Delia said, she with the deep brown eyes.
    “Is something wrong with that?” Their caution brought my spirits down. “I thought you’d like having more pies.”
    “That’s fine with me,” Fritz said. “Let’s get them picked.”
    We returned to the work at hand. I heard geese chattering on the Lewis River. It made a wide loop not far from my father’s house, and the birds liked stopping there on their way south. I set the apples from that tree aside and marked the basket too. I’d cut a dozen branches from that tree this winter and graft them in the spring to extend the number that gave me my perfect fruit. I heard my family call to one another, make jokes, and gather at the baskets to drink water from the jugs. I felt separate from them and couldn’t name the feeling that settled over me. Frank caught my eye and sent an encouragingsmile. Perhaps I should have shared my dream and effort along the way so that this moment of triumph wouldn’t seem like mine alone.
    It occurred to me that my father had been only half correct with his lessons in the orchard that day: it was important to dream, but sharing it with those you loved made achievement even better.

F IVE

S HELLY B ERRINGER
Baltimore, 1901
    S helly Berringer would arrive any time now. It was her first trip to Bill’s home in Baltimore. She’d obsessed about what to wear, how much dust there’d be on the stage between Annapolis and Baltimore, whether she might change her clothes somewhere in between before seeing Bill. She carried an umbrella to ward against the June sun but wouldn’t really need it. June along the Chesapeake Bay was never really warm so much as balmy.
    Shelly wasn’t impressed with professors, yet W. A. “Bill” Snyder, in his forties, had caught her fancy. She was surrounded by instructors at the naval academy where her father taught. One had to see through the fog of their academic words to find their true hearts. Bill was shorter than her father but carried himself like a general, which he wasn’t. He was a man with a purpose, though, aware of his surroundings. Billhad brushed away the fog and shown that his true interest wasn’t for teaching so much as the subject he taught: botany. Shelly had never paid much attention to the science of plants. It was the comfort