Mulcahy's eyebrows went up a quarter inch. "Your binders."
"There are three of them," I said. "And a laptop. I think it will save us all a lot of time." I held the door wider. "And Mrs. Whitcombe should probably come in too. She'll want to hear this."
* * *
To explain the binders I have to explain the buckeye, and to explain the buckeye I have to explain Dale.
My husband died in the fall of 2022, eleven weeks after a diagnosis that the oncologist delivered with the word "aggressive" in it three separate times, as though we might miss it. We had lived for twenty-six years in a drafty Victorian in Delaware, Ohio, with a slate roof that leaked in four places and a sugar maple in the side yard that Dale had tapped every February for syrup that came out thin and sour and that we poured on everything anyway. After he was gone, the house was too big and too full of him, and the roof leaked in a fifth place, and I could not climb the ladder to see where.
So in the spring of 2023 I sold it and bought a two-bedroom ranch in Wren Hollow, a subdivision of a hundred and eighty homes on the northern edge of Larkin, twenty minutes north of Columbus. The houses were built in the late nineties, vinyl and brick veneer in a palette the original developer apparently described as "harvest tones." The streets were named for birds — Larkspur was the exception, a flower that had snuck in, which I liked — and there were curving sidewalks and a clubhouse with a pool, and a ribbon of common greenway that ran behind the back lots along a retention pond and a strip of second-growth woods the developer had not bothered to clear.
What sold me was the trees. The developer had planted the boulevards in the cheap and cheerful way of the nineties — Bradford pears, mostly, which split in every ice storm — but someone, some long-forgotten landscape architect with a conscience, had tucked native trees in among them. A pin oak at the corner of Larkspur and Thrasher. A redbud in the Pruitts' side yard. A black walnut along the greenway that dropped its green-husked nuts like grenades every September. And at the bend where Larkspur curves toward the clubhouse, on the little triangle of common ground the HOA mowed, an Ohio buckeye, maybe thirty feet tall, with its palmate leaves like green hands held up to the sky.
Dale would have liked that buckeye. He was a Michigan man by birth and spent his whole married life in enemy territory, and he used to say the Ohio buckeye was the only honest thing about the state, because it told you exactly what it was going to do. It leafs out first, before anything else in the woods, in late March. It flowers in April, pale yellow-green candles. And then, if the summer is even a little dry, it drops its leaves in August, weeks before everything else, a tree that seems to get bored of summer and leave early. You can set a calendar by it.
That is, more or less, what I started doing.
The extension office at the state university runs a citizen-science program called the Ohio Seasons Project. Volunteers adopt individual trees and shrubs and record their life stages — phenology, it's called, the study of when things happen in nature. First leaf. Full leaf. First flower. Peak bloom. Fruit. Color change. Leaf drop. Over years, across thousands of observers, the data shows how the seasons are shifting: redbuds blooming nine days earlier than in the 1980s, maples coloring later, that sort of thing. A former student of mine, Tamsin Oyelaran, now a postdoc in the entomology department, ran the photo protocol for it. She called me in April of 2023, a month after I'd moved, and said, "Ms. Haskett, I know you're retired, but I also know you, and you are going to lose your mind in a subdivision without a project."
She was right. I had already reorganized the spice rack twice.