The Sleeping Beds

Frost came to the garden in the first grey hour before dawn, and by the time the girl woke it had laid a fine white rime over every leaf and stem. She went out with her breath clouding before her and stood at the low fence, looking at the beds she and Nyra had tended all through the long green months. The tall stalks had gone brittle and brown weeks ago, their bright heads faded to seed and gathered in, but the frost made them beautiful again, whitened and stiff and glittering as the light came up over the headland. It was not an ending, though it had the look of one. She had learned the difference by now.

Nyra found her there a little while later, wrapped in a shawl against the cold, and the two of them walked the rows together without hurry. There was a kind of work that belonged to this turning of the year, and they knew it well. They cut the spent stalks down to the earth and laid them in the compost by the wall. They spread a thick blanket of straw and fallen leaves over the beds, tucking the sleeping roots against the frost the way a mother tucks a child against the night. The garden did not need their worry now, only their care, and the two were not the same thing.

By midday the frost had melted from all but the shadowed corners, and the beds lay dark and bare and ready under their covering of straw. The girl thought of the seeds gathered in their pouches on the hearth-shelves, of the ones carried down the coast by boat and out over the hills by a woman with a three-day road behind her, of the blue high-meadow flowers now waiting in the dark soil at the fence for a spring they would not see for many months. All of it was waiting now. The whole world seemed to be drawing a long slow breath and holding it, patient as the earth itself.

When the light began to fail they went indoors, and Nyra set the kettle over the fire while the girl warmed her cold hands at the embers. There was no hurry in the house and no sorrow either. Nyra said, in her low and gentle way, that winter was not a thing to be endured but a thing to be trusted, that the garden was doing in the dark exactly what it was meant to do, and that everything asked of them now was patience. The girl thought she understood. She had been afraid of the cold seasons once, when she was younger and grief was newer, but she was not afraid of them anymore.

Outside the window the light went from grey to deeper grey and then to the blue of early dark, and the first stars came out sharp and keen over the sleeping beds. Somewhere down the coast and far inland, in cottages the girl would never see, other seeds were waiting too, tucked away on other shelves, held by other hands against the turning of another year. It seemed to her a quiet kind of marvel, that so much living could be folded so small and carried so far and kept so faithfully through the dark. She sat with the warmth of the fire on her face and the whole patient winter before her, and for the first time in a long while she was not waiting for anything at all, only resting, as the garden rested, in the sure and simple promise of the spring.