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things we've buried || fuzzy
Jan 22, 2018 9:39:16 GMT -5
Post by xov thao 12b [Bella] on Jan 22, 2018 9:39:16 GMT -5
I don’t know about an afterlife, but with my hands in the earth I can feel Ma and Daddy are still living. We’ll never feel them hold us again when we’re crying, or listen to their stories, or hear their laughter again in anything but our own minds. But here they are, their bodies in the roots, their atoms struggling up through the dirt just like the rest of us do every day, towards the light. They’ll never take care of us like they used to, but they still feed our bodies, give us everything they have.
The garden is a promise to be kept and I keep it every morning from spring to fall, listening to the worries of the plants and giving them what they need to grow. Ripred knows we need them to grow too, and from late fall til the warmth creeps back into the soil you can hear all our bellies rumbling in the night together like distant thunder.
Others must need these vegetables too, people or animals, because some mornings I used to come out and find less food than I had counted. That was before I made the barbed wire fence that now curls up around my tomatoes and squash, twisted the barbs together with my own hands and cut them into points. Maybe I’d share if this were a different place, or even a different time; but this is a poor end of a poor district, and when hunger threatens it’s my family against the thieves of winter and the world.
I’ve gathered up the daily harvest in a basket and covered it in muslin to keep the crows off. The late afternoon sun beats against my neck and forehead and I wipe the sweat from each with my hand. My hair’s wrapped up in a bandanna the way mom used to keep it when she worked. Each time I do it myself I can hear her directions just like she taught me as a little girl, tying my hair in a knot and then swaddling it in the square of linen she’d died pink with beet juice and vinegar. Now it’s faded to a blushing beige, but it’s not like I’ll ever get rid of it.
All that’s left of today’s work in the garden is to plant the lettuce and spinach seeds, but I’m not quite ready to leave for the morning squalor that’s sure to greet me back in the house. Fingers wrapping around the roots of a dandelion, I start to pull weeds just to keep myself busy. The District gives us these peaceful mornings, full of promises it rarely keeps. But it doesn’t hurt a girl to daydream, at least when no one’s looking.
