The Far Work

The beds had begun to brown by the time the mornings turned cold. The plants that had stood green and full through the summer went slack and papery, their leaves curling in upon themselves, their stems drying to the colour of straw. She had known this would come. She had watched the garden do it once before, the year she first turned this ground, and she had learned by now that a bed going over was not the end of anything but the plainest part of its work.

Her marked plants she knew at a glance, the waxed cord still knotted about their stems where she had tied it in the flowering season. She went down the row without hurrying, cupping each dry seed-head in her palm before she took it. Some were ripe and ready, the seed loose and rattling in its husk when she turned it; others she left a few days more, for a seed gathered too soon would never keep. The eye that had once wondered at everything now simply knew.

She had brought not a single pouch but a handful of them, each a square of cloth she had hemmed herself through the long evenings. Into one went the seed of the plant that had flowered before all the others; into a second, the seed of the ones that had stood thickest and held their leaves through the dry spell; into a third, the seed of the plant that had carried its flowers longest into the browning. She did not let them mingle. Each guess she had made in the summer she kept apart, so that the spring might answer every one on its own.

Nyra had told her, back when the cord was new, that a wise gardener saves more seed than she can ever use, and she understood the saying better now with the pouches filling in her apron. She could not know, standing here in the cold, which of her savings the ground would bless. So she gathered from all of them, the early and the hardy and the long-flowering alike, and she wrote upon each pouch in her plain round hand what it held, and she carried them down to the cool store where the beans and the grain already waited out the winter.

When the pouches were stored and the beds stood bare, she stayed a while among them in the failing light. The near work was done, the growing and the tending and the gathering all folded away. What remained was the far work, the one thing she had no way of hastening, sleeping now in cloth in the dark of the store: what the seed she had chosen would make of a spring she had not yet lived. She found she was content to wait for it. The waiting, she had learned, asked as much of her as the digging had, and she meant to give it gladly.