The winter was colder than Clara expected. Snow settled along the fences, and one January storm brought down a limb from the old pear tree behind the house. Ben came over with a saw and helped her clear it. They stood afterward in the kitchen warming their hands at the stove while the little willow bundles rested in the cool cellar below, labeled and protected from drying. Ben asked whether she still dreamed about teaching school in Indianapolis.
"Sometimes," she admitted. "Mostly when the roof leaks or the bank sends another statement."
"You can still go."
"I know. I'm beginning to think I could go for a while and come back, or teach here while I study. I don't think I need to decide the rest of my life at nineteen."
Ben smiled. "That would be a sensible thing to learn young. Took me much longer."
She asked whether he had ever wanted to return to farming after taking the elevator job. He looked toward the window, where bare trees stood black against the winter sky. "Once or twice," he said. "But I was afraid to trust it again. Maybe I confused caution with a decision I couldn't change."
Clara reached for Evelyn's blue ledger and placed it between them. They spent the evening reading old entries, recognizing some of the farms Evelyn had helped after floods and finding evidence of earlier willow trials along the creek. A note from 1946 described cuttings planted near a damaged fence that rooted successfully and protected a small strip of bank for three seasons before cattle broke them. Another recorded a failure after branches were planted too late in dry summer ground. Evelyn had known both outcomes and had kept working, not because the failures were imaginary but because they taught her something.
By March of the following year, the county had established a small, practical program for streambank planting, supported through existing soil conservation work and local volunteer labor rather than a sudden fortune of outside money. Some farms qualified for technical assistance or approved conservation cost sharing; others paid their own expenses or traded labor with neighbors. Clara's role was to propagate modest amounts of plant material, demonstrate the method, and keep records that could be compared with the next season. She did not become rich. She became useful to enough people that her work could support the slow effort of keeping the mortgage current.
When spring rain returned, Clara went to the drowned land before dawn. The creek rose, spreading brown water across the lowest places just as it had the previous April, but she was no longer watching only two hundred fragile sticks. The original willows had spent a growing season establishing roots. Their stems bent in the current, and most remained anchored, though the strongest water scoured one exposed bend and tore out several plants. Farther along, the bank held better where the new roots were thickest. Clara measured both places and recorded the losses without disguising them.