"We're going to go with a retractable," Tess was saying. "That way you can get it out of the way fast if you have to. We've got sixty feet of clothesline to work with, so I think we'll put the mounting bracket right outside your kitchen window, and the hook on that tree over there. The line will run north to south, which will give your clothes maximum sunlight, so it's the perfect setup. Electric dryers account for ten percent of home energy use. It's crazy. That is is your kitchen window, isn't it?" your kitchen window, isn't it?"

I nodded. "Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it."

"A deal for me," Tess said. "It only cost nineteen ninety-five, plus tax."

"Don't forget labor," I said.

"Speaking of which," Tess said. She adjusted the angle of the ladder. "Hold this for me, okay? Unless you want to go up."

"No thanks," I said.

I was so focused on holding the ladder tight I didn't see Rosie come back with the wheelbarrow. Behind me, a shovel hit the ground with a thud.

I jumped.

"Whoa," Tess said. "I'd like to live through this clothesline installation."

Rosie put her hands next to mine on the ladder to help me hold it steady. We tilted our heads up to watch Tess juggle a screwdriver, some screws, and a mounting bracket above us.

"Sorry about that," Rosie said. "I don't think they liked their manure leaving the yard without them. But now that they know where you keep your cereal, just be careful when you leave your door open. You know, when you're bringing in groceries, that sort of thing."

"Are you serious?"

Rosie shrugged. "They'll do anything for breakfast cereal. If it happens again, just shake a box, and they'll follow you anywhere."

Like I didn't have enough to worry about without adding fear of chicken invasions to the list. Maybe I'd just put my house on the market.

"Do they have a brand preference?" It seemed like something I should know.

"Well, Rod's not too fussy, but the hens prefer Kashi Good Friends, though they just did a number on your Special K, so maybe it's a new favorite. By the way, the hens kind of stick together, so we call them the Supremes."

"Oh, that's perfect," I said. "They're so cute." I wasn't sure I believed that, but I thought I'd try it on for size.

"Sometimes they're cute," Rosie said. "As long as nobody messes with them. They had a bad rooster before Rod, and they ganged up on him and killed him."

"What did he do?" I whispered. I was back in my house-on-the-market zone again.

Rosie shifted her hands on the ladder. "Besides fertilizing the eggs, a rooster's job is to scout for danger, to keep the hens safe from predators, even to lay his own life on the line to protect them if he has to. The last rooster just didn't really give a shit about them. And hens don't take disloyalty lightly."

"Wow," I said. "That's so impressive."

"Yeah," Rosie said. "You can learn a lot from chickens."

Tess started making her way down the ladder, pulling a lengthening white cord with her.

"Okay," she said. "Now we just attach a screw hook to the tree, loop this doohickey at the end of the clothesline over the hook, and you'll be officially breaking the law. If you need to get it down in a hurry, just unhook it from the tree, and it will retract automatically. You'll have to reach out from your kitchen window to feed the line down to someone on the ground, or borrow my ladder, to set it up again, but there's really no way around that."

As soon as the clothesline was attached to the tree, we carried the ladder back to Tess's house and moved on to the garden.

Rosie pushed my box of Special K out of the way and picked up a shovel. "So," she said. "I'm envisioning an informal lavender patch. I brought starter plants in three varieties-Grosso, Hidcote, and Munstead-to give you a good mix of color, form, and height. You can add to it once we see which kinds do best in your yard, and also which ones you like the most. Sound okay to you?"

"Sure, whatever you think," I said.

Tess picked up a shovel, so I did, too. We started turning over the soil in an area in front of some bushes that Rosie said would give the plants winter protection from the wind as well as good southern exposure. I'd never once thought of my house in terms of direction, and suddenly I had both a clothesline and a garden facing south.

Rosie stopped digging and leaned on her shovel. "The trick to taking care of lavender is not to overlove it."

"The trick to taking care of anything is not to overlove it," Tess said.

I had a sudden urge to write that down.

"So true," Rosie said. "Anyway, lavender doesn't like a rich soil, so we're going to go really easy on the chicken manure. Drainage is key, which means we'll build up the bed and add sand, plus throw in some time-released lime to make the soil more alkaline."

"How do you know so much?" I asked.

"How do you know so much about shoes?" Rosie asked.

I dug my shovel in, and it barely made a dent in the packed soil. "Occupational hazard, I guess."

Rosie jumped on her shovel with both feet. "Well, mine is more an accident of birth. You grow up on a lavender farm, you learn more than you ever want to."

"Wait," Tess said. "I don't get it. I thought you were the new owner."

"I am. Well, I guess I'm the new old owner. My mother died, my father couldn't keep up with things, so I was the dutiful daughter who stepped up. And dragged my family kicking and screaming with me."

I wondered what I would have done if my mother had wanted me to move in after my father died. I wondered what it meant that she hadn't.

Rosie stopped shoveling long enough to push some red curls out of her face. "It's the last place I would have pictured myself at this point in my life, but what could I do?"

Tess and I nodded sympathetically.

"My husband is a contractor, and I do his landscape design, plus my own jobs, and the kids didn't have to switch schools, so it was all doable, but..."

"But that doesn't make it easy," Tess said.

Rosie dug the shovel in again. "My parents were inseparable, and even when my mother started slipping into dementia, it was all about lavender for her. She stopped cleaning the house, and one day when my husband and I brought the kids to visit, we found she'd painted everything purple so the dirt wouldn't show. The walls and the refrigerator, inside and out. Even the toilet seat. The paint wasn't quite dry on that, and we all had purple rings around our butts for the next two weeks."

"Oh, your poor father," Tess said. "How's he doing now?"

The garden was taking on a nice shape, kind of like a paisley at the edge of my yard. Tess started pulling clumps of grass and weeds out and shaking the dirt off them.

"He's doing okay," Rosie said. "We moved him downstairs to the family room and put in a bathroom just for him. We had a family party to celebrate, and he spent the whole time giving bathroom tours."

"Well, that's good," Tess said.

Rosie nodded. "It's tough though. We had to think ahead. So we had them put a grab bar next to the toilet. We told him it's a towel rack, so he wouldn't get upset. They put in a thirty-six-inch doorway, big enough for a wheelchair, and he said, What in tarnation is that barn door for? What in tarnation is that barn door for? So my husband said it was because they were out of small doors." So my husband said it was because they were out of small doors."

"Good thinking," I said.

Rosie leaned on the handle of her shovel again. "We put in a double shower, too. We told him it's in case he has company." She smiled. "I think he liked that one."

After Tess and Rosie left, for the first time in a long time, I picked up the phone and called my mother, instead of waiting for her to call me on Sunday.

Day 12

10,001 steps

ROSIE AND TESS WERE STANDING IN MY DRIVEWAY WHEN I pushed my front door open. pushed my front door open.

"Wait," I said. I unlocked my car with a click and grabbed the shoes I'd exchanged for Rosie, plus the two purple pedometers. I'd completely forgotten about them yesterday.

"Genius," Tess said. "Pedometers are all a little bit different, so this way we'll be on the same page with our mileage. Let me run back to my house and grab my reading glasses so I can set it. Unless one of you still has decent eyes?"

Rosie and I shook our heads. The thing I minded the most about getting older was that I no longer had twenty-twenty vision. It had hit me like a ton of bricks one night right after I turned forty. I was sitting in a restaurant with a date, and suddenly I couldn't quite read the menu. What's good? What's good? I remembered asking the waiter. I remembered asking the waiter.

Rosie was holding her pedometer in one hand, stretching her arm as far away from her as it would go and squinting.

"Do you want me to go inside and grab some reading glasses for you?" I asked.

"No, I think I've got it," she said. She pushed a button and hooked the pedometer onto the waistband of her shorts. "I'll just do the step mode for now and figure out the mile mode later." She sat down on my driveway and began taking off her old sneakers. "Boyohboy, could I use some new sneakers."

I opened the shoe box, handed one sneaker to Rosie, and started lacing up the other one for her.

"Great, they're just like yours and Tess's," Rosie said. "We'll look like triplets. Oh, this feels amazing."

"State-of-the-art technology scientifically activates your posture," I said. "Excellent flexibility plus a good measure of stability makes for a stellar heel-to-toe transition. Double-patented gel pad in heel, as well as a triple-patented air-cushioned arch support."

"Wow," Rosie said.

"The Walk On By," I finished, "the shoe every woman needs to walk herself away from the things that are holding her back and toward the next exciting phase of her life."

I took a bow and handed Rosie the shoe I'd finished lacing.

"Thanks. I know it's spin, but I still like it. Did you make it up yourself?"

"Some of it, I think," I said. "It's hard to even remember anymore."

Tess's screen door slammed. We heard it click as she opened it again. "Well, try getting home at a decent hour and you'd be awake by now!" she yelled. She slammed the door again and jogged over to us.

"Your husband?" Rosie asked.

"Funny," Tess said. "Okay, where the hell did I put my glasses?"

I pointed. They were hooked on the front of her T-shirt.

"Thanks," she said. She tucked the rolled-up chart she was carrying under her arm and put on a pair of black reading glasses edged in pink. "Ohmigod, I just remembered," she said. "At the last primary, my husband and I both forgot our reading glasses when we went in to vote. I kept thinking we could be voting for anybody."

There was a beat of silence, and then Rosie said, "How can they clone sheep and not have an operation to do away with reading glasses?"

I breathed a little sigh of relief. For a minute there, I'd thought we were going to talk politics. There's nothing worse than thinking you have so much in common with someone, and suddenly she opens her mouth and you find out she's on the board of directors of a religious cult, or still smokes cigarettes, or vomits after every meal. I didn't care what Tess and Rosie believed in, politically, spiritually, or nutritionally. I wanted to like them. I wanted to walk.

"There's some new kind of lens implant," Tess said. "But I'm going to wait till they work out the kinks first." She unrolled the chart. "Okay, this is one of the mileage maps we use at school. Continental United States, with a decent map scale. There are also a couple of Web sites we can use to track mileage online, but I think we should hang this up somewhere for visual impact-and motivation."

I pointed to my garage. "Plenty of room," I said. "I only have one car, so we can take over half of it and make it Command Central. Or we can use a room in the house if you'd rather."

"No, the garage is perfect." Tess looked up. Her glasses made her look like some kind of tropical bird. "Okay, let's synchronize our pedometers, set the ground rules, and start today."

A thought came over me with such force that I was surprised my head didn't light up like a bulb. "Oh, oh," I said. "I think I've got the perfect idea to get our mileage up where we need it to be so we can go someplace good."

"Great," Tess said. "But come on, I'd kind of like to walk today."

"Here, give me that," I said. I took the map and tucked it inside my garage door.

Tess held up her pedometer. "Ready," she said. "One, two, three, and push." We all pushed the reset buttons on our purple pedometers at the exact same instant.

I waited till we were out on Wildwater Way before I sprang it on them. "Okay," I said. "Get this. We're allowed to use our frequent flier miles."

"What do you mean?" Rosie asked.

"What I mean," I said, "is that we can add our frequent flier miles to the miles we actually walk to bring up the total miles we can travel."

Rosie and Tess stopped walking. "That's brilliant," Tess said. "Absolutely brilliant. I've racked up tons of frequent flier miles with my airline credit card. It's such a pain in the neck to use them, I never get around to it."

"I have a bunch stockpiled, too," Rosie said. "We can go anywhere we want to go."

I hadn't felt this good in ages. I turned right at the corner and started race-walking ahead of them.

"Hurry up," I said. "The sky's the limit."

I WAS LATE getting to the Fresh Horizons South small-group meeting. After we'd finished walking, I'd jumped in the shower, put on a nice pair of jeans and a crisp white blouse, and spent some time doing my hair and makeup before I lost those skills, too. I wanted to look more casual than I had at the last meeting, but I also wanted to look good in case one of the more-shabby-than-chic guys started to grow on me. You never know. getting to the Fresh Horizons South small-group meeting. After we'd finished walking, I'd jumped in the shower, put on a nice pair of jeans and a crisp white blouse, and spent some time doing my hair and makeup before I lost those skills, too. I wanted to look more casual than I had at the last meeting, but I also wanted to look good in case one of the more-shabby-than-chic guys started to grow on me. You never know.

I couldn't resist hanging up my wet towels on my new clothesline before I left. Later, I'd wash a load of laundry, maybe the first one I'd looked forward to in my entire life. Tess had been kind enough to throw in a little basket of wooden clothespins that hooked right over the line.

After clothesline duty, I headed over to check on my lavender patch. I ran back into the house and grabbed a coffee cup and used the outdoor spigot to fill it with water. I gave the plants, each neatly labeled by Rosie with a little metal sign that poked into the ground, just a touch of water down by their roots. I made sure I didn't get water on their foliage, because Rosie said it might cause mold.