The Seed That Gives Nothing

The beans had dried on the vine, and Nyra brought a bowl of the pods to the step where the girl sat shelling. She did not open them all at once. She took one pod, split it along its seam with her thumb, and rolled a single seed out into her palm. Then she pressed the edge of her nail into it, slowly, and turned her hand so the girl could see the mark she had left, which was no mark at all.

“A seed worth keeping is one that gives you nothing,” she said. “Press it and it stays itself. The other kind takes the mark and holds it, and by spring it will have gone soft in the jar and come to nothing. You will not learn which is which by looking at them. You learn it here.” She turned the girl’s hand over and set the seed in the middle of it, and folded the young fingers closed around that small hardness with her own.

The girl pressed as she had been shown, feeling for the difference between the seed that answered and the seed that gave way beneath her nail. She wanted to be sure of it, to have it again in every autumn that came after this one. Was there some way, she asked, to set the feeling down in her book, a few words she might write so that the knowing would be waiting for her another year.

Nyra was quiet for a moment. “There are things the page will take from you and call it keeping,” she said. “Write this one down and you will read your words instead of asking your hand, and the words are only a picture of the feeling and never the feeling itself. Every seed is its own. The book cannot press them for you. Only the hand can be in the seed with you, and it has to stay awake to do it.”

So the girl wrote nothing of the seeds. She let the book keep the plainer things, the number of the jars and the day she had filled them and set them by, and she let her hand keep the rest. Some of what she knew would live only there, in the pressing and the asking, and she found she did not mind that it would never lie flat and finished upon a page. It would meet her new each year, and each year she would have to reach for it again.