The Sleeping Roots

The snow came in the night and lay over the garden by morning, smoothing every bed and furrow into one pale sheet. To the girl it looked like an ending. She stood at the low fence and said, in a small voice, that everything under there must surely be dead now, gone cold and finished for good.

Nyra shook her head slowly. She told the girl, in her low and even way, that the garden was not dead but only drawn inward, gathered down into itself the way a sleeper draws the blankets close. The roots were there still, she said, holding their small stores of warmth, waiting out the dark months in a sleep that was not death but only patience wearing the look of it.

What seemed the cruellest thing, Nyra went on, was in truth a kindness. The snow lay over the beds like a blanket of wool, and beneath it the deeper earth kept softer than the bitter air above. The frost that whitened the surface guarded what slept below, holding the cold at a single hard edge and letting the roots keep their long rest unharmed.

Down there, in the dark she could not see, a patient work went on. The seeds she had saved and the roots she had left in the ground were keeping a promise made in the last green days, a promise to wait, to hold, to be ready when the time came. Nothing hurried them. They kept their own slow measure, older and surer than any clock the village owned.

The girl looked at the white field a while longer, and something in her face began to ease. Winter was not the end of the garden, Nyra told her, but a breath the whole earth held before speaking again. The green world had not left them. It had only gone quiet and gone under, gathering itself in the dark, waiting for the morning the light would call it up once more.