remained, the soil was cooler and yielded more easily. At about a foot down she reached clay that was still damp enough to hold its shape when squeezed. She set the clump on a board and carried it back to the house to examine beside a sample from the bare field.
The samples looked different, but less dramatically than she had first imagined. The soil beneath the willows included darker flood deposits and fine organic material that the roots and shade had helped retain. The unplanted soil was mostly compact clay with a hard surface crust. She photographed the two clumps with a borrowed camera, wrote the location of each sample on the back of the prints, and mailed copies to Margaret Ellis. She wanted to know how much of the difference was caused by the trees and how much had been there before she planted them.
Margaret wrote back with the answer Clara was beginning to expect: some of both, and more measurements would be needed to separate them. She recommended protecting the existing vegetation, avoiding unnecessary digging close to young roots, and observing what happened in the next flood. The response disappointed Clara for a moment. Then she remembered how badly she had wanted somebody to take her work seriously in April and understood that serious attention included being told what she could not honestly claim.
Mrs. Phelps came to the farm one Tuesday with an empty bucket. Clara met her at the gate, puzzled, because Ada usually carried food into the house rather than asking for something to take away. Her neighbor's face was pinched with worry. The little creek along the Phelps property had nearly dried, and the grass on the eroding bank was brittle where spring floodwater had torn it loose.
"Clara," she said, "I've been watching those trees. I was one of the people who thought you were going to lose every last one. But they're holding on, and my creek bank isn't. Is there any chance I could get some of those sticks from you?"
"They're still growing," Clara answered. "I don't want to cut enough to damage them."
"I don't need a forest. Just enough to get a start."
Clara looked across the willow rows. The question was not simply whether she had branches to spare. If Ada cut the fresh green growth now and pushed it into a baked creek bed, many of the cuttings would likely die before establishing roots. Clara did not want to answer generosity with advice that might waste her neighbor's time. She asked Ada to come inside while she fetched Evelyn's notes.
They sat at the kitchen table with the instructions between them. At the bottom of the page Evelyn had written that dormant winter wood, planted into ground that remained moist, often rooted more reliably than branches hurried into a summer drought. She had also written that keeping the banks covered through winter mattered as much as adding new trees. Clara read the words aloud, then explained what Margaret Ellis had taught her about protecting exposed soil with grass and brush until planting weather returned.