Ruth’s First Spring

Over thirty years ago, Ruth Calloway drove north with everything she owned in the back of a Volvo and a classified ad in her coat pocket. Stone cottage, 2BR, needs work. Garden. She was forty-one, freshly untethered from a marriage that hadn’t failed so much as faded, and she had no plan beyond the next turn in the road. What she found at the end of a quiet lane in Clover Hill, Vermont, was a wreck of a cottage, a garden buried under years of neglect, and a life she didn’t know she’d been missing.