She’d parked her Mini on the shoulder down the road out of sight. No sense warning these guys she was coming. Trees appeared like ghostly Ents out of the morning mist that rose from low-lying patches of land. She had no problem with fantasy. The thought of talking trees appealed to her. She talked to her plants, didn’t she? She believed they listened. The construction workers had already unloaded their massive yellow equipment. Wary, she inched between a bulldozer and an earthmover, her pulse pounding like a jackhammer, her steps muffled by damp early-morning August earth. When she saw the digging bucket of a backhoe, its horizontal stabilizers already deployed, hovering dangerously close to the fragile glass roof of one of her greenhouses, she swore. Oh, her babies. What if Noah hadn’t noticed these men on his way into town and called her? They would have destroyed her work without her knowledge. All of it down the tubes with the casual flick of a machine’s lever.
