The Wondering Hand

The row had come on well since the thinning. The girl stood at the end of it in the early light and looked at the plants that were left, each one set a little apart from the next, broad and easy, with room to open its leaves. The leaves that had once crowded and paled were fuller now, a deeper green, and they threw a faint shade over the dark earth between them. She had not walked out to the bed in some days, and she was surprised by how much good the space had done. Nyra came up the path behind her with a pitcher held against her hip.

“They look glad of the room,” the girl said. “But I keep thinking of the ones I took out. They were green and whole, every one of them. Could I not have carried them somewhere else, instead of giving them back to the ground?”

Nyra set the pitcher down and looked along the row. “A few of them, maybe. The strongest of what you pull, if your hand is quick and the day is soft, will take to a fresh bed and forgive you the moving. But the littlest, whose roots have barely caught, will only sicken if you lift them. You would spend a week of care to keep alive what the earth was ready to take back in an afternoon. The art of it is not to save every green thing you touch. It is to spend your care where it will come to something, and to let the rest go without calling it a failing.”

“Then how am I to learn which is which?” the girl asked. Nyra laughed low and warm. “By moving some and losing them, and moving others and watching them thrive, until your fingers know the weight of a root that will travel and the weight of one that will not. I have thinned more rows than I could ever count, and still I come to stand where you are standing now, and wonder whether I chose rightly.”

The girl looked at her, taken aback that the doubt did not fall away once she had learned the way of the work. “It does not leave you,” Nyra said, more quietly. “It only grows familiar. The wondering is not a mark that you did the work poorly. It is the part of you that still cares what became of them. Keep hold of that, and let it walk beside the certain hand, and you will tend well enough.” The girl turned back to the row, where the plants stood green and easy in the light, and she found she could live with the wondering, if the price of losing it was to stop caring at all.