Never the Same Spring

The next morning they returned to the garden and knelt at the second bed, and the girl, who had lain awake with a thought, sat back on her heels. “Does it ever feel like the same beginning, over and over?” she asked. “The same beds, the same cold hands, the same turning of the earth, every year without end?”

Nyra did not answer at once. She pressed a handful of soil between her fingers and let it fall, watching how it broke apart. “It might look the same from the lane,” she said at last. “One woman and her spade, the same plot, the same month come round again. But I have never once turned the same spring twice.”

“The ground is never the same,” she went on. “Some winters leave it sodden, some leave it hard as a floor. And I am never the same either. My hands have learned things since last spring, and forgotten others. The girl kneeling beside me is not the girl who knelt here a year ago.” She looked sideways at her. “You have grown a hand taller, for one thing.”

The girl considered this, turning a clod over in her palm. “So it only looks like the same beginning,” she said, “but it never really is.” Nyra nodded. “A thing can be old and new at once. That is what a garden is. You do the oldest work there is, the work your grandmothers did before you, and still no two mornings of it are ever alike.”

They worked on after that, and the girl fell quiet for a while, as though the thought had settled somewhere deep in her. Near the end of the bed she spoke once more, almost to herself. “Then I will never run out of beginnings,” she said. And Nyra, turning the last of the soil, told her that no, she never would, so long as there was ground to kneel on and a spring to kneel in.