The Near Work — Echoes of the Real

The girl came each morning now, but she no longer knelt at once over the sown bed. She had learned, from Nyra and from her own impatience both, that there was nothing for her hands to do at the dark soil while the seed did its hidden work below. So she stood a while and looked, and then she turned to the rest of the garden, where the labour of the season was already plain and asking to be done.

There was always water to carry. The young beds along the low fence drank quickly in the lengthening light, and the girl went down the rows with the pitcher, tipping a slow thread into the base of each plant so the ground drank it rather than the air. Nyra had shown her how the earth took water best when it was given without hurry, and the girl found that the carrying was a plain tending she could see the end of, which the sown bed could not yet give her.

There were birds to mind. The buried seed drew them, and the girl strung pale cord between two stakes and hung strips of bright cloth that turned and flashed on the wind. She did not run at the sparrows with her arms and her voice, which only scattered them for a moment and taught them nothing. She made the bed a place they did not care to land, and left them the rest of the garden, where there was plenty they were welcome to.

There was the almanac to keep. Nyra had her set down each morning what the sky had done and what the ground had felt like under her hand, so that a year from now there would be a record of this waiting and of whatever came of it. The girl wrote in a small round hand, and found that the writing made the days count for something even on the mornings when nothing at all showed above the soil.

So the waiting was not idle after all. It had its own hours and its own near labours, and the girl moved through them without once digging at the bed she was waiting on. She understood now what Nyra had meant about hands folded, that it did not mean hands doing nothing, but hands turned to the near work while the far work went on below, out of sight, in its own good time.