I figured I should take this opportunity to explain a few things. In my other Harvest Moon 64 story, Jack moves into a large house on the farm. That holds true for this story as well. Some people contacted me to contest that, so I'll explain my reasoning to you. I wanted my stories to be at least somewhat realistic. If you think about it, an old man who was living on a farm most likely had said farm for a long time. Logically, one could assume that he raised his children on that farm. Ergo, he wouldn't be having a small, one room house. He would have something larger, something that would accommodate the size of his family.

That being said, I'll tell you a little bit about this story. As with my other one, this is a Jack/Karen fic. But once again, I changed the ages of the characters so that they were older yet than my other story. My other work of fiction also felt a little too bright to be about Karen, seeing as how quiet, reserved, and anger prone she is. That fueled my desire for this fic.

Now that my episode of self-justification has been finished, please don't refrain from telling me exactly what you think of my stories. I would simply ask that if you are going to criticize or praise the work of fiction, to please provide examples from what has been written so that I know what needs to be worked on and what I'm doing well.

Thank you.

And I don't own Harvest Moon. Natsume does. I simply buy their games.

Grandpa was dead.

Standing at the bow of the ferry to Flowerbud Village, I could hardly believe it. It seemed as though Death was now stalking my bloodline. My wife had died three years before Grandpa, while giving birth to our daughter. My mother had died a year or so before that, and now my other grandfather up in Sugar Village was sick. Add it all together, and I was pretty depressed most of the time.

"Why are you going to Flowerbud?" A man about my age came up next to me and leaned on the railing.

"Funeral," I answered shortly; I held out my hand. "I'm Jack."

The man returned the handshake, the wind blowing his brown hair around. "Name's Cliff," he answered. "I'm a drifter, but I have a couple of places that I go to make the rounds. That there's my mate, Cain," he finished, pointing at a speck in the air.

He saw the confusion on my face, so he whistled. The little brown speck started dropping towards us, falling like a rock, until the hawk spread its wings and whooshed to a perch on the railing. "We go everywhere together," Cliff continued. "Other than Ann, he's been my only real friend."

I smirked. "So you're heading to Flowerbud Village for a girl."

Cain took off, and Cliff and I headed inside to talk. It had been at least sixteen years since I had last been to Flowerbud, so I used his memory to help me remember where everything was. I couldn't remember much of anything about the time I had spent there with Grandpa, so talking to Cliff was a real help. In exchange for telling me where all of the shops were, Cliff regaled me with tales about a redheaded young woman named Ann.

Talking to Cliff helped pass the time, and it took my mind off of Grandpa's funeral. He let me know that he would be staying up on Moon Mountain with the carpenters, and said that I could probably stay there too if I needed a place to sleep.

When we got off of the ferry in the late morning sunshine, there was a group of people waiting. Off to one side of the dock was a short, portly old man who I knew was the mayor. The other group consisted of a redheaded woman wearing coveralls, a brunette woman wearing jeans and a purple vest, and a short bald man.

Cliff and I shook hands again, and separated to head for our greeting parties. The girls started shrieking when they saw Cliff, and swarmed him with hugs. I hooked my duffel bag over my shoulder and headed for the mayor.

"I am so sorry you had to visit under these circumstances," Mayor Thomas told me quietly, shaking my hand. "Why don't we head to your grandfather's house? The funeral isn't for another couple of hours, but there's some things we need to talk about."

We started walking up the path away from the beach, listening to the little party going on behind us. "I was sorry to hear about your wife, John," Thomas ventured. "I know your grandfather was pretty torn up by it when he went to the funeral. If you don't mind my asking, why did you not bring your daughter with you?"

The path took a turn to the right, and we passed the sign saying "Greene Ranch" as we continued on. "Kairi never met Grandpa," I explained after a moment. "I don't want her only memory of him being a pale, old man in a coffin. It would be better for her to not remember him at all."

Silence followed us the rest of the way until we reached the sign saying "Kiefu Farm." The Mayor started walking straight down the path without pausing. I took a deep breath then followed him.

The fields were definitely a mess. They were much smaller than I remembered, but they were covered in stones, boulders, and trees. The barn and chicken coop looked to be in good shape, as did the tool shed and the horse's stall. Grandpa had improved on the house, too, since I had been here last at the age of ten.

It was no longer a single room shack. Now, I could see from the outside, the house looked at least four times larger than it had when I was here as a kid. The Mayor unlocked the front door and waved me inside.

The front door opened up into a spacious living room, complete with a sofa, recliner, and entertainment center. Along the back wall, there was a stairway to the roof. To the left of the door, I could see the kitchen, dining room, and bathroom; to the right, there was a hallway leading to the house's three bedrooms.

Thomas walked over to the TV, and turned it and the VCR on. He waved me to the couch. "I want you to watch your grandfather's video will," he told me. "I've seen it and so has your father, since he helped prepare it." He hit the "Play" button.

The screen was fuzz for a minute, and then my grandfather was sitting there in his recliner and looking no older than when I had last seen him at my wife's funeral. "Well, John," he began, "if you're seeing this then I've kicked the bucket. In light of that, my boy, I have some requests to make as I pass on my property.

"I know from talking to you that you need and want a place to start your life over. Here it is. I am giving to you, my grandson John, all of my property and holdings in Flowerbud Village so that you can do what you need to do with your life." Grandpa paused and then went on. "There is a condition, however. You have two years to make the farm prosperous again. At the end of the two years, your father will come here and evaluate how well you've done in making this a home for you. Of course, you don't have to do this. Your father can just sell the farm now, but he gets to keep the money if you fail."

Grandpa seemed to look straight into my eyes from the television set. "Please don't let me down, John," he finished quietly. "This farm has been in our family for six generations. Don't let us lose some of our history."

I stared at the TV for a moment, silent. It was still incredibly depressing that Grandpa was dead, but I marveled at this last gift of his. He had hit the nail on the head, I knew. I did need somewhere that Kairi and I could go where we could start over, start from scratch. It would be pretty simple to start, too. All I would have to do is call the office and tell them I wasn't coming back, and then give them the address to mail my last check to.

The TV started to hiss, and the mayor was just turning his head to look at me. "I'll do it," I answered before he could ask. I shrugged. "Grandpa was right, I need to start over."

Thomas stood up. "The master bedroom is the last door on the right," he told me, indicating the hallway that the bedroom doors came off of. "The funeral is going to start in two hours, so you might want to start getting ready." He let himself out the door, leaving me alone.

The funeral itself was a short, quiet affair. Everyone in the town had turned out for it, all dressed in mourning black clothes. I stood in the back of the church with Cliff standing next to me; I may have just met him, but he was the best friend I had in the village. There was no open casket, but the coffin was sitting out in front of everyone on an altar. After the service, Cliff, Harris the mailman, and Hal from Greene Ranch helped me carry the casket out to the graveyard, where it was lowered. Most of the villagers went from there to a wake that was being held in the town square, but I headed back to the farm.

Knowing that I needed to do something to get my mind off of my grief, I decided to look through the tool shed. Hanging on racks on one side, I could see a hoe, a sickle, a shovel, a sledgehammer, an assortment of construction tools, and a watering can. On the shelves along the other wall there were a number of empty seed bins labeled with vegetable names; I could see a couple of bags in the potato and turnip bins. There was a wheelbarrow leaning on the back wall.

Pulling the sledgehammer off of the wall, I tested its weight. The job I was now leaving was in construction, so I was well familiar with the tools associated with manual labor. Looking at my watch told me that it was only four o'clock.

I hurried into the house to change into some work clothes, and then ran back outside to collect the wheelbarrow, shovel, and sledgehammer. My thought was to crush the smaller rocks with the sledgehammer and turn them into gravel, which would then get poured on the walkways up to the house and barn.

It only took fifteen minutes of rock crushing before I had to strip my shirt off because I was so hot. The feel of the breeze blowing across the sweat covering my chest immediately energized me and took my mind off of the funeral. I had been working for nearly an hour when Cliff came walking up the path.

"So, the rumors are true?" he asked, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

I pulled a pack of cigarettes out of one of my pockets and lit one; Cliff shook his head when I offered one to him. "What rumors?" I asked, leaning the sledgehammer against the wheelbarrow and taking a breather.

"The people in the town are saying that you're going to take over your grandfather's farm."

After blowing a cloud of smoke up into the air and watching it for a few silent moments, I nodded. "Yeah. I am."

Cliff stood next to me in silence. "Do you think you would be interested in some hired help?" he asked cautiously.

I pulled my gaze down from the darkening sky and arched an eyebrow at him. "I thought you were a drifter?"

He actually turned red. "Well. . . . I really like Ann, so I thought that maybe if I could work here, then I could stay around long enough to know if things will work out."

I shrugged and took another drag off of my cigarette. "I won't be able to pay you for a while, not until the farm starts producing, but if you're up for it then let's do it. Go grab your stuff. You can take the bedroom closest to the living room."

His face brightened up immediately, and he started shaking my hand violently before running back towards town. He disappeared around a bend in the trail, and then almost immediately reappeared with his travel bag in hand. I breathed in one last lungful of smoke before grinding the cigarette butt into the ground and getting back to work.

"Wow," was all Cliff said when I told him what I was doing. He shook his head. "That's a little more than I can do," he admitted. "I think I'll have to stick with weeding. Do you want me to start on it tonight?"

"If you could," I nodded. "There are a handful of bags of potato and turnip seeds in the shed, so if we could get some of those planted we can be on our way to earning money."

Cliff went inside to throw his stuff in his room and change, and was back out in the fields five minutes later, pulling weeds and throwing them into piles while I continued making gravel. We called it quits at seven-thirty, and stepped back to check our handiwork. Almost impossibly, we had managed to plant the turnip and potato seeds.

All in all, we had done a lot. We had cleared enough room to be able to plant and move around ten bags of seeds worth of crops. The two of us were starting to feel pretty good about how soon we were going to be making some money. I took my shower first, and then sat down to call my father.

Not surprisingly, he already knew that I had accepted Grandpa's challenge. He agreed to pack up the little important things I had lying around my apartment in the city and said he'd pack up all of Kairi's toys and that they'd arrive the next afternoon, as well as bring me the equivalent amount of local currency that my final paycheck would amount to.

After Dad hung the phone up, I laid down in bed. There was a lot to get done tomorrow.