The Season Will Answer

The cold had shut the garden down to bare earth and the memory of green, and the girl came up the lane to Nyra’s door with a question she had carried since the beds went brown. Inside, the hearth was low and warm, and the old plants hung drying from the beam in bundles the colour of straw. Nyra set a cup in her chapped brown hands and let her come to it in her own time. “You have that look,” Nyra said, not unkindly. “The look of someone turning a thing over in the dark and finding no edge to it.”

“I saved from the three I judged best,” the girl said. “The early, and the ones that held their leaves through the dry spell, and the plant that carried its flowers longest. I kept them apart, each in its own cloth, just as you told me. But I lay awake wondering. Come the thaw, when I put them in the earth, how am I ever to know which of the three was the true one? How do I read the answer?”

Nyra laughed, and there was a warm unhurried music in the sound of it. “You do not read it. You are not the one who answers, child. The season answers. You have only to ask it plainly.” She turned her cup in her palms. “In the spring you sow them side by side, a short row of each, close enough that the same weather falls on all of them and the same soil holds them. Then you stand back. You let the rain and the light and the cold nights be the counsellors. The plants that rise strong and true have told you more than any wakeful night could.”

“But a single spring is a fickle judge,” Nyra went on, and her weathered face grew thoughtful. “One year favours the early, another the hardy, and the plant that failed you this turn may be the very saving that carries a harder year. So you do not trust one answer and stop. You write it down. Each spring you mark in the almanac what you sowed and where, and each autumn what it gave you. The book remembers what you would forget. Season laid upon season, the knowing thickens, until one day you look back through the pages and see plainly what no single year could show you.”

The girl was quiet a while, watching the bundles turn slowly on their cords. She saw it then, the true length of the thing she had begun: not a choice to be made in a season and finished, but a patient asking that would outlast this winter and many after it, an answer built a line at a time in a plain round book. She had thought the saving was the end of the labour. She understood now that it was only the question set down, and that the years themselves would spend a long time answering.