Hands Inside My Hands

The girl had been quiet a long while, watching Nyra coil the new string, when she asked who had taught the old one all that she knew. “Someone must have shown you the sharpening and the saving and the reading of the sky,” she said. “You could not have learned it all alone.” Nyra smiled without looking up from her hands. “No,” she said. “No one learns a garden alone. There was a woman before me, and a woman before her, back further than either of us can count.”

“What was she like?” the girl asked. Nyra was quiet for a moment, the way she went quiet when she was reaching a long way back. “She had hands like roots,” she said at last, “hard and brown and never still. She did not talk the way I talk to you. She showed. She would put a seed in my palm and close my fingers over it and wait, and I would stand there not knowing what she wanted, until one day I did.” She turned the coil of string over. “The knowing came slowly. It always does.”

The girl thought about that. “But she is gone now,” she said, and it was half a question. “She is gone,” Nyra agreed, gently. “A long time now. And still she is here, in every furrow I straighten and every pouch I label. When I kneel down in the spring, her hands are inside my hands. That is what teaching is. It does not end when the teacher does. It only changes whose fingers are doing the work.”

“Then whose hands are inside yours when you show me?” the girl asked. Nyra laughed, low and warm, and set the string aside. “Hers. And the ones before her, all the way down. And soon enough,” she said, “mine will be inside yours, and you will not even notice the day it happens. You will kneel in some garden years from now and find you know a thing you never remember being told, and that will be me, still here, showing you.” The girl looked down at her own small hands as if they had become something new.

That night the girl lay awake and thought of the long line of women stretching back into the dark before her, each one bending over the earth, each one closing a child’s fingers over a seed. She had thought a garden was a thing you made new every year, out of nothing but soil and hope. Now she understood that it was older than that, and kinder: a thing handed forward, palm to palm, down all the winters that had ever been, so that no one who loved the green world ever truly had to leave it.