The Names of the Seeds

Deep in the heart of winter the days drew short, and the garden lay under snow with nothing to be done in it. On such evenings the work moved indoors, to the long table near the hearth where the pouches of saved seed were kept in a shallow basket. The girl liked these nights best of all, when the wind pressed at the shutters and the embers glowed low and the whole of next summer waited inside a handful of small paper packets. She would tip them out one at a time and lay them in rows, and Nyra would sit across from her with a stub of charcoal, ready to write.

Each pouch held a little of the season just gone. Here were the sunny yellow ones the girl gathered door to door, and here the deep red from the far cottage, and here the blue that the woman from the hills had carried down over the ridge. Some were folded from old letters and some from the corners of worn cloth, and every one of them needed a name and a place, so that come spring no one would stand over a furrow wondering what she had planted. Nyra said an unmarked seed was a promise you might forget to keep.

They labelled them slowly, and there was no hurry in it. The girl would name a flower and Nyra would print it small and clear on the paper, and between the names they talked of where each one ought to go, the tall behind the low, the early beside the late, so the beds would come up in their proper order and nothing be crowded out. It was a kind of planning that felt like remembering forward, and the girl found she could see the summer beds already, laid out warm and full in a garden that was, for now, only snow.

When the basket was sorted they tied the pouches into bundles and hung them from the low beam where the air was dry, out of the reach of mice. The girl stood back and looked at them swaying gently in the heat of the fire, a whole summer’s worth of colour bound up in grey paper and string. It seemed a small thing to hold so much, and yet she thought that was the truth of most kept things, that they asked for little room and gave back more than you could measure.

Later, when the fire had burned to a red heap and the girl was nearly asleep against the old one’s shoulder, she asked what they would do if a name washed off, if the rain got in or the charcoal faded and a pouch came up blank. Nyra was quiet a moment, then said that the garden had a memory of its own, and that even a seed you could not name would know itself when it woke and put up the only flower it had ever meant to be. Some things, she said, you labelled for your own sake, to feel you had a hand in the keeping, and some things kept themselves whatever you called them, and the trick of a long life was learning which was which.