The frost came ten days earlier than I wanted it to, which meant the calendula was done before I was, which meant I spent most of Tuesday morning kneeling in cold dirt swearing at a flower bed in a language nobody in Thistledown, Vermont has spoken correctly in about four hundred years.

Nobody heard me. That's the nice thing about swearing at plants. No one calls the language police on you, and the plants don't seem to mind either way.

I run a shop called Hearth & Bramble, on the corner where Elm Street stops pretending to be a through-road and just admits it's a driveway to the co-op parking lot. Tinctures, dried bundles, a wall of jarred honey from three different beekeepers who each think their bees are superior and will not be told otherwise, a rack of soaps a woman two towns over presses by hand and drops off every full moon like it's a delivery schedule instead of a coincidence, and a back room that smells permanently of woodsmoke and rosemary no matter what I actually burn that week. The front window still has the original gold-leaf lettering from whatever business occupied the space in the forties - I never had it stripped, because Thistledown likes its history worn where it can see it, and because, if I'm honest, I like watching the letters fade a little more each decade. It's a nice reminder that time moves for buildings too, even when it forgets to move for me.

I've had the shop for nineteen years under this name. I've had some version of this shop, under some version of this name, for considerably longer than that, but nineteen years is what's on the lease, and nineteen years is what Thistledown believes, and I have found that the truth is rarely as useful as what people are willing to believe.

I have been Marguerite. I have been a half a dozen other people after that - names picked up like coats in a closet that got too crowded to sort through properly, worn until they didn't fit anymore, or until the people who knew them got too old to keep asking questions about why I hadn't. Wren is the one I like best, if I'm honest with you, because a wren is a small, plain, brown bird that nobody bothers to shoot at, and after four centuries, being beneath notice has stopped feeling like an insult and started feeling like a small, private luxury.

I measure by feel. That's not humility, that's just accuracy - I could tell you the precise ratio of yarrow to elderflower in the fever blend down to the gram, I simply don't need a scale to get there, the way you don't need a ruler to know your own hallway is six steps long. Ora Bettencourt, who has been buying that fever blend from me for eleven years and from whoever ran the shop before me for Goddess knows how long before that, watched me pinch and drop and pinch again without measuring a single thing and said, the way she always says it, "You ever gonna write that recipe down, Wren, in case you get hit by a bus?"