Aurora Sky: Blackout (Completed)

Chapter 28

At the fort, everyone was either inside doing housework or outside sowing seeds and planting fruit trees collected from Home Depot a week ago. Once Arthur, Isaac, and Jess had returned from setting up the hunting cameras, they stashed away their gear and joined the others to work in the field.

The muggy and humid air made everyone sweat under the clouded sun, but each of them powered through their exhaustion. Kimmy and Krissy were planting grape vines, raspberry, blueberry, strawberry, and blackberry bush seeds along the inside edges of the southwest corner, planting each in its own row of tilled earth. All along the length of the driveway, Duke dug holes with a shovel and planted the baby trees: a green and red apple, peach, pear, pomegranate, cherry, fig, and a nectarine tree. Though the baby trees were sagging slightly, Ron believed they could still be salvaged or at least thought it was worth the attempt to do so. Even Marie and Alexis were pitching in, gathering the fallen walnuts from the black walnut tree in a toy wagon for harvesting.

Ron was wheeling his motorized tiller that dug through the earth ten inches deep. He had dug over fifteen rows in total in the northwest corner. Each row was near one hundred feet in length and had a few feet of space in between to allow the room for the roots to grow.

At the end of the first row conversing were Lacey and Natalie. Lacey was instructing Natalie how far apart to place the seeds for the sweet corn. "Make sure they're at least a foot apart. The roots need the space to grow, but corn stalks are really thick and they'll grow upright without any need of assistance so we won't have to build trellises for these like the snow peas over there that Paul is planting in the second row."

"Got it." Natalie told her as she squatted down, kneeling to the ground and dirtying her tight blue jeans. She looked up and squinted her eyes from the sun, "How deep do the seeds need to be?" she asked.

"Just an inch or two. You can just poke your finger into the dirt and plant it in the hole."

"Hey Lacey!" Isaac called out when he had made it over to them. "We're done for the day. Anything we can do to help here?"

"Yeah sure!" she said enthusiastically. "Here, you can take these cucumber seeds, plant them in the third row there next to Paul. Arthur, you can plant the tomato seeds in the fourth. Jess, take these squash seeds and the fifth row. Place each seed about a foot of apart for root space. Also, put two or three seeds in each hole. Some of them won't germinate. But if multiple do sprout in the same spot, that's fine. We'll pick them and replant them somewhere else."

"That sounds good to me." Isaac said to Lacey. He smiled at her and got to work. He worked in between the rows that Paul and Arthur inhabited, pushing his finger through the soft dirt and placing three seeds in each hole. He covered it up with the loose soil and moved onward.

In between planting, Isaac stopped to take it all in. He remembered his first time he stood in the empty field, visualizing in his mind what he wanted this land to be. Now, it was everything and more. He knew there was no way he could've completed his vision in such a short amount of time by himself, and he vowed at some point to thank everyone individually for their contributions.

"You know what I'm missing right now?" Paul asked.

"What's that?" Isaac asked back.

"Cameron's parents pool. I could really go for a swim right about now."

The thought of an ice cold pool sounded like heaven to Isaac in the scorching summer heat. "Shoot, I feel that."

"Whatcha you planting over there?" Paul asked Isaac. He wiped off the beads sweat from his brow with his white t-shirt and brushed his dirt covered hands on his pants.