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Excerpt from Chapter 1:
Pam Walker had not seen her husband all morning and only vaguely remembered his whispers of "a secret project up in the fields" as he sprang out of bed before dawn. Had it not been for the phone call from Tallahassee she answered while finishing breakfast, she would have left Mark, and his project, well enough alone. But the phone conversation was unsettling enough for Pam to put on a light sweater and cross Farm to Market Road in search of him. Clipper and Cutter, their two Labradors who had been playing tug-of-war with a large rope in front of the inn, sensed an adventure was at hand, so followed closely on Pam's heels.
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Since opening the Montis Inn for business the prior November, Pam had seldom found time to stroll through the orchards and appreciate the quiet of their higher pastures. Straight rows of mature apple, pear and peach trees consumed most of their open property on that side of the road, and the land gently rolled from one orchard to the next, with most having wonderful views of Montis Inn to the east and Woodrow Lake to the south.
The smells, Pam noticed as she looked for her husband, varied dramatically from grove to grove. Surrounding her through all of them was a constant low hum of honeybees trying to get the early nectar. Spring was well under way.
"Mark?" she called across a field - a small and protected pasture that held Mark's "Darwin experiments," saplings of unknown origin that were too young to identify. On that morning, it seemed odd to Pam that the number of Darwin trees appeared to have increased exponentially even though Mark had gained some horticultural expertise over the preceding year.
Both dogs looked up in anticipation of hearing his voice, but there was no answer.
After combing two other fields, she followed the edge of the woods to the farthest corner of the smaller north orchard where she turned toward the mountains and ducked onto a path shrouded with low-hanging limbs of massive evergreens. After fifty yards the path opened onto a quarter-acre field dotted with two dozen white boxes on stilts - the apiary for Montis Inn.
From a distance, Pam could see Mark, who was facing away from her, standing in a hole knee-deep. He hoisted a few shovelfuls of dirt out, measured the depth of the hole with the shovel handle and held the shovel up to a large root ball of a tree lying on its side next to him. Then he began digging again.
"So this is your Manhattan Project?" she asked, walking up to him.
Mark looked up with a broad smile. "Well, good morning - I love you."
It was something they said to each other every morning. He always delighted in seeing his wife unexpectedly, especially outdoors. She was tall and lean, and wore comfortable tan khakis and a plaid shirt with a yellow sweater that almost matched the color of her hair, which was being rustled by the breeze.
"Aren't they just great?" Mark asked excitedly, regarding the dozen unplanted trees that surrounded him.
"More apple trees?" Pam asked.
"Oh, no - something much better. But I want it to be a surprise."
"You just got a call from the Florida Department of Agriculture in Tallahassee," Pam informed him.
"Oh, really?" Mark feigned ignorance of what they might possibly be calling about.
"It seems they want to know why you are exporting rare Tupelo gum trees out of their state."
Mark hesitated only for a moment and cried out, "Surprise!"
"Surprise, what?"
Mark started talking with the exhilaration of a young boy. "These things are great, honey. Chuck Bryson told me about them last month."
"Chuck advised you to illegally import gum trees to Lumby?" Pam asked in disbelief.
"Well, no," he paused. "We never discussed that part of it, exactly. But this is better than gold."
Pam looked at her husband with strained curiosity. "And how would that be?"
"Okay, let me explain. These," he said, pointing to the saplings, "are just the beginning. I'm having another twenty delivered in a few days."
"Perhaps not, according to Mr. Wilbur from the Department of Agriculture," Pam corrected him.
"Oh, yeah, but I can work that out," Mark said, dismissing her concerns.
She walked over to the gum trees for a closer look. "He said they found your trees in the back of a cattle truck with forged documents."
"The trees?" Mark asked, sounding very surprised.
"No, the cattle," Pam answered flatly.
"Not a problem," he repeated. "Anyway, these are incredible. Tupelo gum trees - they live for one thousand years! Can you image that - one thousand years?" Mark uprighted a sapling. "And, they grow up to ninety feet tall."
Pam held back a chuckle. "But why are you planting them here at Montis?"
"Because of the bees, of course."
"The bees?" she asked.
"All right, here's the plan," Mark said, putting an arm around his wife. "These gum trees only blossom for two weeks out of the year, and the bees," he explained, pointing at the hives, "will use the sweetest of nectars to produce Tupelo Honey and Honeycomb. The stuff is pure gold - hundreds of dollars an ounce. And we can sell some to the monks so they can make Tupelo Rum Sauce."
"And how much," Pam asked cautiously, "did the trees cost?"
Mark answered quickly. "About five hundred dollars each."
Pam stepped back in alarm. "Mark! We're barely breaking even at the inn! We can't afford fifteen thousand dollars' worth of trees."
"But the honey is very rare."
"Have you seen it?" she pressed him.
Mark smiled, knowing he had done his homework. "At the Lumby Feed Store. I saw a jar from Ellie's Apiary for a hundred and twenty dollars."
"And it said Tupelo Honey," Pam continued.
"Not exactly, but Chuck and I had a long talk. He said that the label was surely mismarked but there were, indeed, very rare and expensive honeys to be made. And that's when he told me about the Tupelo trees."
"Ah," Pam said, nodding her head. "One question: How do you get the bees to only go to these trees and not the other thousand fruit trees we have in the orchard?"
Mark looked at her intently but didn't say a word. After a long pause he said in a more thoughtful voice, "I'll discuss that very issue with Chuck - he knows everything about our bees."
"And these gum trees? They're indigenous to Florida?"
"And Mississippi swamps," Mark elaborated.
"Low, wet lands in hot, high humidity," Pam said academically.
"Exactly," Mark answered.
Pam again raised her brow. "So what makes you think they'll grow on a mountainside in dry air with a harsh winter climate?"
Mark again was stumped by his wife's common sense. "I'll be sure to talk to Chuck about that as well. Got to get back to work," he said jumping back into the hole.
Pam knew this was one battle not worth fighting. Glancing at her watch, she said, "Please remember that Brooke and Joshua are coming over for lunch before the delivery. You only have about an hour."
"I'll be early this time," he said, lifting a shovel piled high with dirt.
Pam decided not to comment.
As she walked down through the orchard to Montis Inn, she stopped on the knoll where she and Mark used to picnic the summer before while the fire-ravaged abbey was being restored. They would sit on their favorite quilt and talk for hours about how to transform the abandoned monastery in to an inn with historical landmark status. Those were seven of the most demanding but exhilarating months of her life.
As Clipper and Cutter played with trimmed branches, Pam looked down toward the inlet to Woodrow Lake a half mile away. During the winter months, several acres that they had later bought between the orchard and the lake had been cleared, and true to their plan, a local carpenter had erected several barns and one large stable. The exposed soil surrounding the new buildings was slowly being replaced by a carpet of brilliant young grass.
Her sweeping gaze paused on Montis Inn, a century-old stone monastery that they had painstakingly restored. It was their second summer in Lumby, and Pam could not have been happier. The corporate life she had followed so rigidly in Virginia seemed foreign to her now. If not for Mark's unconditional belief that there was a better life for both of them, she would never have had the courage to change. In Mark's unpredictable way he had kept her more true to herself.
Pam returned to Taproot Lodge, the smaller of the Montis buildings that she and Mark had converted into their private residence. She was beginning preparations for lunch when Brooke opened the screen door.
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