One More Song

He knelt. The trowel felt foreign in his hand, a weight he did not yet know how to balance. He chose a small, untended patch of earth not far from where the woman worked her own row, her presence a quiet anchor in this new and uncertain space. He watched her for a moment, the steady, practiced rhythm of her movements a song he did not yet know the words to.

He turned back to the soil. His first turn of the earth was hesitant, a clumsy, shallow scoop that barely disturbed the surface. He paused, feeling a flush of self-consciousness. But the woman did not look over. The rope-maker, further down the row, continued his own patient work, his back a sturdy, unjudging line against the morning sun. There was no audience here. There was only the work.

He tried again. This time the trowel went deeper. The soil gave way with a soft sigh, dark and rich. He turned it over, then again, and a third time. A rhythm began to form, a slow and unsteady beat to start, but one that grew stronger with each turn. It was the simple percussion of metal against earth, a sound that began to find its place alongside the whisper of the woman’s hoe and the distant, rhythmic thud of the rope-maker’s knotting. The garden’s quiet song, the one that had first drawn him in from the edge of the harbor, did not stop for him. It simply made room, its patient harmony expanding to hold one more voice, one more worker, one more tentative note in its ever-growing chorus.