The Season of Tending

The one green tip did not keep to itself for long. Over the next few mornings the girl found others beside it, faint and new, pushing up through the crust in a loose and crooked row. By the end of the week the whole bed had taken on a green cast, so slight that she had to kneel to be sure of it. She counted them the way she had once counted the days, and then she stopped counting, because there were more than her fingers could hold.

Something had changed in the shape of her days. What had been buried and hidden was now out in the light, and the light was hers to answer for. The far work went on below, unhurried and quiet, sending down the roots she would never see. But the near work had shifted with the shoots. Now there was crust to thin so the small stems could stand, and the first weeds to pinch out before they learned the bed was theirs, and the daily task of telling a true seedling from some chance visitor blown in on the wind.

She learned that a crop and a weed could look the same when both were young, and that the only cure for the confusion was patience and a good eye. She learned to work with her fingers and not her whole hand, to loosen the soil around a stem without troubling the root beneath it. Nyra showed her how a weed pulled too hard would take a neighbour with it, and how a crust left unbroken would turn a soft rain into a hard shell over everything. The girl’s hands, which had learned to stay off the ground while the seed did its slow work, now had a hundred errands to run.

There is a season for waiting and a season for tending, Nyra told her, and the whole of a garden’s wisdom lay in knowing which one you were standing in. In the waiting season a good gardener keeps her hands from the soil and lets the ground do what only the ground can do. In the tending season she keeps them busy, for the shoot left alone now will be choked by autumn. The trouble came, Nyra said, when a woman brought the habits of one season into the other, fretting the seed that only wanted quiet, or idling while the weeds made their patient claim.

The girl understood then that the waiting had not been the work itself, only the door the work had come through. All those grey weeks of folded hands had not been empty; they had been the ground gathering itself to answer. Now the answer stood in a crooked green row, asking for her in a way the buried seed never had. She knelt in the early light and began the small and patient tending, and it did not feel like the end of anything. It felt like the true beginning she had been waiting to be given.