Love's First Bloom by Delia Parr Page A

Street. By listening carefully to snippets of gossip when she had gone into the village with Phanaby, she had learned that he was a confirmed bachelor who called his ship his home, and that he sailed between here and a number of coastal cities as far north as Boston and as far south as Charleston.
    She stopped for a moment and scanned the river, but since all the ships anchored there had dropped their sails, she could not be sure if the Sheller was among them. She did not know if Grant was part of her father’s network, or if any of the other towns or villages on his route had become home to the fallen angels who had started new lives. She suspected he was simply one of many sea captains who carried her father’s precious cargo simply for the money they earned.
    Choking back the fear that her father’s life and his ministry might soon end if he was wrongly convicted, she hurried along to the one place that gave her any sense of hope, as well as privacy. She finally rounded the bend and spotted the finger of land she now claimed as her own, and her smile stretched into an ear-to-ear grin when she approached the very place where Jane Canfield’s flower garden had once flourished. She set down her heavy canvas bag and rotated her shoulder to ease out a kink before tackling today’s work to get the earth ready to receive plants that would bloom with color again—at least she hoped. The garden itself had surrendered to weeds many years ago. Ruth had spent two hours here every morning for the past week, ripping out anything and everything that had taken root.
    She stared at the rocks peeking through the broken earth and sighed. Although the soil was dark and moist with promise, it also contained a heavy crop of rocks that needed to be cleared before she could plant anything at all. Ruth assumed that the rocks must have bordered the garden at one time, but since many were scorched, it appeared that someone at another time had used them to provide a bed for an open fire.
    Still, she was not going to let anything, including a little hard work, keep her from developing this garden into a private sanctuary where she could be alone with her thoughts and forget for a time the future of her father and the disturbing news that reporters were seeking to find her.
    She leaned back on her haunches to rest her arms. According to Phanaby, the nearest family lived on a ranch a good four miles downriver. Ruth had caught a glimpse of their cattle grazing on wild salt grass, but she had never seen anyone tending to them, which meant that this little piece of land was hers and hers alone to enjoy for as long as she lived here in the village.
    Completely at ease with her isolation, if not ecstatic, she removed her shawl to make it easier to work. She neatly folded it and set it on top of a patch of clover a good bit away from the garden and opened the canvas sack. She secured a pair of old gloves Phanaby had given her and put them on, happy to have them despite the fact they were too big for her. After glancing at the rocks one more time, she chose a small, iron garden pick as her first weapon of choice from the tools Phanaby had loaned to her.
    The first rock she attempted to remove was so stubborn she gave up trying and tackled a smaller one, which gave up its hold on the earth but tore a small hole in the palm of one of her gloves in the process. “Why?” she asked, gritting her teeth as she struggled to remove the next rock. “Why does everything I want to do have to be so hard? Can’t you help me do this?” she grumbled, hoping God might just this once take mercy on her.
    By the time she finished struggling seven rocks from the ground, she had also managed to berate God for every trouble He had sent her way lately, starting with the accusations against her father that had resulted in his arrest.
    Disgusted with herself for losing whatever grace she had received during her morning prayers, she squinted as she wiped away a band of