The First to Flower

The corner she had made in the spring was two beds now, and the girl went to them first each morning, before the well and before the hens. She had stopped counting the days since she moved the strongest of the seedlings across the plot. The counting had belonged to the early part, when she did not yet know whether the travelled roots would hold. Now the moved ones stood green and certain in their fresh soil, and she came to them not to worry but to watch.

There was a way of looking she had learned without meaning to. Where once she had crouched over every stem, turning each leaf and asking after it, now her eye went along the row and knew in a breath which plants were thriving and which wanted water. The knowing had worn smooth, the way a path wears smooth under feet that pass it daily. She could tell a leaf gone limp from thirst from a leaf gone limp from too much wet, and she no longer stopped to wonder how she could tell.

What she watched for now was the flowering. Nyra had told her the seed was the whole point of the keeping, and so the girl waited on the buds the way she had once waited on the first green tip. The moved ones budded a little later than the row she had never lifted, as if the travelled plants spent some part of their vigour holding their new place before they could spare any for flowers. But bud they did, and one morning, in the corner bed, a single moved plant opened its flower before all the others.

She tied a length of waxed cord loose about its stem, so that when the season browned the beds she would know this one, the first of the travelled plants to bloom, and could keep its seed apart from the rest. It seemed to her worth the knowing, whether the earliest to flower would give the bravest children or whether that was only a story she told herself over the work. Nyra had said to save the seed and see. The girl meant to save it and see, and the seeing was a year off yet, and she found she did not mind the waiting.

She stood a while between the two beds in the low morning light, the moved row and the row she had left where it woke, and she thought that she was tending two things at once now, the plants that grew and the question of what their seed would make. The first was near work, the watering and the watching and the thread tied round a stem. The second was far work, a thing she had no way of hastening, that would answer only when a spring she had not yet lived came round and lifted its own green out of the ground. She gathered her pouch and her pitcher and went to the near work, keeping the far one folded quiet at the back of her mind, the way Nyra kept the seasons that had not yet come.