A Tool Held Out

The silence held for a long moment, a shared stillness stretched between the newcomer and the stranger. Then she moved. She crossed the small distance between them, her steps sure on the familiar earth, and held out a small trowel, the one she had used that very morning to tend the bloom.

“There is a patch of earth here that needs turning,” she said, her voice quiet but clear. The man looked at the tool, and then at her, and then at the rope-maker, who worked on nearby, seemingly oblivious to it all. But in the stranger’s eyes there passed a flicker of understanding, the same understanding she herself had once come to.

He took the trowel. It was an echo of the welcome she had once been given, and in the plain fact of the tool passing between them the garden gained another pair of hands. She had crossed, once, on just such an offering; now she had learned to hold it out.