The First Sowing

When the bed was turned and broken fine, Nyra brought out the pouch of seed she had saved from the year before, a small twist of cloth no heavier than a handful of sand. She loosened the neck of it and tipped a little into her palm, and the girl leaned close to look at the pale flat grains lying there, so plain and so quiet that it seemed impossible they held a whole summer folded up inside them.

They sowed the first row together. Nyra drew a shallow line in the soil with the edge of her hand and laid the seeds along it one by one, spacing them the width of two fingers apart, and the girl followed behind and drew the loose earth back over them. In a few minutes it was done. The row closed up as though nothing had happened there at all, a strip of dark soil no different from the rest of the bed.

The girl sat back and frowned at the smooth ground. She asked how anyone could know the seeds would do anything now, buried out of sight where no eye could follow them, with nothing left above to show for the work. For all they could see, she said, they might have hidden a handful of dead grit in the earth and be none the wiser till summer.

Nyra brushed the soil from her hands and said that this was the hardest lesson the garden had to teach, and the truest. The most important part of the work, she said, always happened where no one could watch it, down in the dark where the seed did its slow and secret labour. A gardener learned to give the seed to the ground and then to walk away and trust it, because the trusting was not separate from the growing but a part of it.

So they finished the row and smoothed the last of the earth flat, and when they stood up there was nothing to see for all their care, only a bare brown bed lying quiet under the thin spring light. But Nyra knew what she had put into the ground, and she knew what the dark would do with it, given time. The waiting had a different feeling now. It was no longer the empty waiting of winter but the full waiting of a thing already begun, out of sight, and sure.