The Seed I Dug Up

The girl came back to the sown bed before the dew had even lifted, and she crouched at the end of the row and looked hard at the brown earth, as if she might catch it in the act of something. She stayed there a while, and then she said, without turning round, “How long, Nyra, before there is anything at all to see?”

Nyra lowered herself down beside her, careful the way she did everything now, and rested her hands on her knees. “Longer than you will like,” she said. “The first green is a good many days off yet, and there is nothing you can do to hurry it along. I know how the not-knowing pulls at you. When I was a girl, smaller than you are now, I could not bear it at all.”

The girl looked round at her then. “What did you do?” she asked. Nyra was quiet a moment, and then she gave a rueful little laugh. “I dug one up,” she said. “Only the one. I told myself I would just have a look and cover it over again, no harm done. I scraped the soil back with one finger until I found it, and there it was, split open, with the smallest white thread of a root only just starting out of it.”

She turned her hand over, empty, as though the seed still lay there in the palm. “I had done the one thing you must never do,” she said. “I had let the light at it. I settled it back and patted it down and told no one, but it never came up. All the others did, in their own good time, and there was one gap in the row where my finger had been. That one gap taught me more than the whole rest of the summer did.”

The girl looked back at the unbroken earth, and this time she folded her hands together in her lap and kept them there. “So the waiting is the work,” she said slowly. “For now it is the whole of it,” Nyra answered. “It looks like doing nothing, keeping your hands off the ground while the dark gets on with what only the dark can do. But that is not idleness. It is a kind of trust you practise with your hands folded, until one morning the ground answers you back in green.”