Budding Prospects (1990)
“We were sitting at a window booth. Relaxing. Eating. Enjoying a supply run and a two-hour break from the routine of the summer camp. In the booth across from us, a brittle-haired woman in her mid-fifties carped at her daughter, while the daughter’s daughter, a two-year-old, kicked at the tabletop. The other denizens of the place—aside from the withered old crone in the checked mini-skirt who performed the multiple functions of chef, waitress and cashier—were two old men, in identical overalls and sun-bleached shirts, who sat at opposite ends of the counter, stolidly blowing into cups of coffee.
Nearly four weeks had passed since we’d last seen Vogelsang, and during that time we’d made determined progress, managing to enclose eight of twelve growing areas, fence the property line between our place and Sapers’s, dig twelve hundred holes, and reverentially transplant every last one of the healthy seedlings Dowst had sprouted. Unfortunately, less than twenty percent of the seeds had prove...n viable, and we wound up with only about fifteen hundred seedlings, a third of which fell prey to some mysterious enervating force in the greenhouse—fungus, leafhoppers, gamma rays, locusts, who could say?MoreLess
Nearly four weeks had passed since we’d last seen Vogelsang, and during that time we’d made determined progress, managing to enclose eight of twelve growing areas, fence the property line between our place and Sapers’s, dig twelve hundred holes, and reverentially transplant every last one of the healthy seedlings Dowst had sprouted. Unfortunately, less than twenty percent of the seeds had prove...n viable, and we wound up with only about fifteen hundred seedlings, a third of which fell prey to some mysterious enervating force in the greenhouse—fungus, leafhoppers, gamma rays, locusts, who could say?MoreLess
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