The walk home wasn't much longer, and as she was coming up the driveway she heard something in the backyard. Curious, she went around the house to see her grandmother chopping away at the limbs of a shrub, one of many that made up the intensely thick brush behind their house. She tossed aside her backpack to hurry over to assist her, but her grandmother stubbornly refused until she finished the limb she was working on.

As Amanda tested the weight of the ax her grandmother had been swinging. It was surprisingly heavy. She brought it down onto a piece of a wood and found the resulting 'thud' a little disturbing to her ears.

"I'm going to beat this property into submission." Doris said breathlessly when Amanda was able to bully her away from the ax, grimacing when she held it in her hands.

"But it's so pretty, Grandma." Amanda tried, "Why would you want to clear it all out?"

"What's the point of having a big property if you can't walk it?"

Amanda frowned, but nodded. "Well...what if we just cleared out a path?"

Her grandmother didn't look all that impressed, but nodded as well. "I guess that would be alright...for now."

Amanda sighed and set the ax down to take a closer look at the brush. It really was pretty.

But she wasn't interested in sitting back and seeing her elderly grandmother hack herself into a broken hip, so Amanda figured she was going to need to take care of this herself - or hire someone. But until she had money, not wanting to bother her mother with this, she would have to work on her own.

She liked work - Amanda had always been an outdoors kind of her. Some of her most precious memories were camping with her father. If she could make a nice path through the brush for her grandmother, she was sure the old woman would leave the rest alone. Life so close to New York City had been nice, but all the buildings had been...very cold. She never settled there. She was much more comfortable during the summers the family spent upstate in their cabin in the woods.

Movement caught her eyes and she tilted her head a little to get a better look. She thought she saw someone there, but it must have been her imagination. No one was there. She lingered for a moment longer before she went inside, grabbing her bag from where she had thrown it.

When her mom came home she would talk to her about what she was going to do with their backyard. She knew her mom would probably agree with her, but she still wanted to run it by her first.

She entered the kitchen through the back door and went straight to the fridge, pulling out several pears.

Pears were her little addiction - she could never get enough of them. Her record for most eaten pears in one sitting was six, nowhere near her dad's record of twelve. She preferred them when they were really ripe, where they would almost melt in your mouth.

She carried them up the stairs to her room, where she dumped her bag on her bed and flipped on the small television in the corner of her room, the sounds of a laugh track filling the silence of her room. After she ate her pears she tossed the stems into the trash bin and went to her window to look out at the backyard, leaning her chin on the windowsill as she looked out at her new home.