Rebecca stepped onto her porch before breakfast and stopped halfway down the steps.
The valley looked different.
Nothing had been built overnight.
Nothing had changed.
Yet everything had.
Smoke curled peacefully from more than a hundred chimneys.
Milk wagons were already making their rounds.
The bakery ovens had been glowing since before dawn.
Somewhere beyond the cabins a blacksmith's hammer rang three measured blows before settling into its familiar rhythm.
Children hurried toward the schoolhouse carrying slates beneath their arms while their parents headed toward fields that had become too large for any one family to imagine only a year before.
Rebecca smiled.
"It sounds different."
Samuel joined her carrying two steaming cups of coffee.
"What does?"
"The valley."
Samuel listened.
She was right.
Last year every sound had been the noise of construction.
Axes.
Hammers.
Saw blades.
Shouted measurements.
Now the sounds had become those of a living community.
Cows lowed from the dairy.
Geese argued beside the pond.
The creamery churns rolled steadily.
Somewhere someone laughed.
The settlement no longer sounded like men trying to survive.
It sounded like people living.
Samuel took a slow sip.
"We've built ourselves a home."
Rebecca shook her head.
"No."
She looked across fields of tomatoes, cabbage, wheat, oats, orchards beginning to bear fruit, and barns already growing too small.
"We've built ourselves a beginning."
Just then Buck Rogers rode into the square carrying a clipboard noticeably thicker than usual.
Samuel grinned.
"That doesn't look like trouble."
Buck laughed.
"It isn't."
He handed Samuel several sheets.
"Orders."
Samuel frowned.
"Orders?"
Buck nodded.
"The warehouses are filling faster than the kitchens can use the food."
"The glass jars are stacked to the rafters."
"The cannery wants more vegetables."
"The creamery needs another cheese cellar."
"The flour mill wants another grain elevator."
"The cooper says he can't build barrels fast enough."
Rebecca looked from Buck to Samuel.
"So..."
Buck smiled.
"I think we've accidentally become exporters."
Silence settled over the porch.
Not the silence of uncertainty.
The silence that follows the realization that yesterday's impossible dream had quietly become today's ordinary morning.
Samuel looked toward the distant rise where one day the Planetary Roundtable would stand.
"I suppose," he said softly,
"it's time the neighbors came shopping."