The First Turning

There came a morning near the end of that long winter when the frost let go of the ground at last. Nyra felt it before she saw it, the way the air over the garden had lost its hard edge and gone soft and damp against her face. She stood at the low fence a while and looked at the beds lying dark and bare under the thin light, and she knew the waiting part of the year was over.

She fetched the girl, who came out wrapped against a chill that was no longer quite the same chill. Together they walked the plot from end to end, saying little, letting their feet learn the softened earth again. Here and there the ground still held a memory of the frost, a pale crust that broke under a boot and let up the smell of thawed soil beneath, brown and living and faintly sweet. The girl breathed it in and said it was the best smell of the whole year, and Nyra, who had thought the same for sixty springs, did not disagree.

They chose the bed nearest the fence to begin, the one that caught the earliest sun. Nyra set the spade to it and turned the first spadeful over, and the earth came up heavy and glistening, threaded through with the pale broken ends of last year’s roots. She worked without haste, not because her back could no longer bear a faster pace, though that was true enough, but because the first turning of the year was a thing to be done with care. The girl knelt beside her and crumbled the clods apart with her bare fingers, and neither of them hurried.

When the girl asked why they did not simply dig the whole plot at once and be done with it while the weather held, Nyra straightened and rested her hands on the spade. She said, in her low and even way, that a garden was not a task to be finished but a year to be lived, and that the first day back was for remembering the shape of the work, not for racing through it. There would be cold mornings enough ahead, she said, and aching evenings, and days when the labour felt endless. Better to begin as you meant to go on, slow and steady and glad of it.

So they turned one bed that first day, and only one, and left the rest lying dark and ready for the mornings to come. Walking back to the house with the smell of the earth still on their hands, Nyra thought that this was how every good year had always begun for her, not with a burst of green nor a sudden warmth, but with a single bed turned over by two pairs of hands that were in no hurry at all. The winter had kept its long silence. Now the ground was speaking again, and they had answered it in the oldest way she knew, which was simply to begin.