Free Listen! (9780062213358) by Stephanie S. Tolan Page B

the page across from the cedar waxwings Charley reads, “‘Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of Heaven, unasked and unsought.’—Pearl Buck.”
    She turns the page. The next photo was taken in the Morgans’ yard, easy to recognize because theirs is one of only three houses on the lake that has a lawn. Everyone else has just the woods, shrubs, with a garden here or there in whatever sunlight can be had among the trees. The photo is a tight close-up, the blades of grass huge, like a dense green forest, bright above, shadowy at the base. A ladybug on one blade, shiny in the sunlight, is the size of a dime. Across from that page are the words “‘Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.”’—The Talmud.”
    There are no angels. Only grass and ladybug.
    Charley remembers her mother mowing the grass. The images are hazy—raggedy blue jeans, green-stained sneakers. No face. Like the way, sometimes, in a dream, she knows who someone is but can’t quite see them.
    Colleen Morgan hated having a whole yard full of grass that needed cutting, hated cutting it, but it was a job she never let her husband do. She would pull the cord to start the mower, and then shout for all the living things hiding in the grass to get out of the way. She would move very slowly, stopping if she saw a cricket or a katydid that wasn’t moving out of the way fast enough. “Head for the short grass!” she’d yell. “I won’t be coming back over what I’ve already cut.” If she saw a toad in front of her, she would stop the mower altogether and move the toad out of the way, dropping it among the azalea bushes or in the flower garden at the front of the house.
    Charley remembers a summer when her mother found a yellow jacket nest in the grass by the willow tree she’d planted as part of her campaign to replace lawn with trees. Mr. Sutcliff was always being stung by the yellow jackets in his yard. “The first one that stings you puts a smell on you,” he told Charley once, “and the rest come after you then. Get stung one time, you’ll get stung fifty times.” Charley and her mother saw him one day when they were out in the canoe, running from his mower, waving his arms around his head. He dashed into his house, yelling and flailing, and slammed the door. For days afterward his mower sat abandoned as the grass grew taller around it. “If you get yellow jackets, you have to go out in the middle of the night and pour gasoline or boiling water down their hole,” he told them.
    But her mother didn’t do that. The first day she found the nest, she stood near it as yellow jackets came and went, talking to them. “I’ve got to mow,” she told them, “but I don’t want to hurt you. You can just keep coming and going until I tell you that the next pass will go over the nest. Then you have to either go down inside or stay out till I’ve passed over. It’ll just take a minute or two, and then you can go back to business as usual.”
    Her father teased her about it all summer—“My wife, the wasp whisperer.” But Colleen Morgan never got stung a single time. Charley asked her why she didn’t tell Mr. Sutcliff that he didn’t have to use gasoline, but she said it was better not to challenge people’s fixed beliefs. The next year the wasps didn’t nest in the Morgans’ yard.
    Her father does the mowing now, and he just mows, not worrying about what might be in his way. But they’ve never had yellow jackets again. Mr. Sutcliff still gets stung every summer.
    Charley touches the photo, feeling the slick surface under her fingers, as if by touching this page she could touch her mother as she lay in the grass, focusing her lens on a ladybug walking a green blade.
    She flips through pages then, skimming, not really