The Thinning

The seedlings had come up thicker than the girl had dared to hope, a close green crowd of them leaning against one another all down the length of her row. For days she had counted it a plain good fortune, proof that the sowing had taken and the bed was kind. Now Nyra knelt beside her and told her, without any softening, that the ground could not carry them all. Some would have to come out while they were small, so that the rest might have the light and the soil to themselves. The girl heard the words and did not want them to be true.

Nyra explained it the way she explained most hard things, plainly and without hurry. A weed, she said, you draw out because it has no business in the bed at all. But a thinning was another matter entirely. The plants the girl would lift now had done nothing amiss; they had only risen where there were too many of their own kind, and a crowded row would give her a hundred weak stems and never a strong one. To keep the whole of them was to lose the whole of them by autumn.

The girl knelt a long while over the row before she could bring herself to begin. It seemed a hard thing to close her fingers on a seedling that was upright and green and blameless, and take it from the earth for no fault of its own. This was not the plain justice of pulling a weed from among the crop. These were the very plants she had waited on and worried over through the cold, and she was to be the one who chose which of them would not see the summer through.

But she began, because Nyra was watching and because she had come to trust her. She learned to take the weakest first and the most crowded after, to leave a hand’s breadth between the ones that stayed, to be sparing and certain rather than slow and sorry. The seedlings that came away in her fingers were not in the wrong place, as the nameless one had been. They were only too many in the right one, and that, she saw now, was its own quiet burden on the row.

When it was done the row looked barer and lonelier than before, and the girl felt the loss of it more than she had thought she would. Yet she could see already how the ones that remained stood a little straighter, with the soil and the light no longer parcelled so many ways at once. She was learning that tending was not only the giving of care but sometimes the choosing of where it could not go, and that to raise a strong row she must be willing, season on season, to give some good green things back to the ground.