I wake in the early hours of the morning. Someone, a dream figure – no, Pete – is standing next to the bed, saying my name. His voice is tight. Something has happened. He sounds as if someone has died. “I’ve dropped one of the boxes of seedlings,” he says. Together we go out to the dark back yard. Outside the door is a mound of broken polystyrene, seed tubes and potting mix. I want to cry. There is nothing to do; it is done. We go back to bed. Pete had woken to the sound of rain – almost the first in two months – and remembered that the tubes needed to be under cover. The seeds were so tiny that it might only take a few fat rain drops to blast them, cartoon-like, out of the safety of their tubes In the dark, he had carried the cartons, each on its bit of worm farm, one at a time in under the awning at the back and onto a second and smaller table. As he let go of the third box, it simply crashed over the edge and onto the brick paving. Forty-eight tubes. We make our way silently back to bed. I for once have the wisdom not to share my priceless thoughts as to how Pete might have managed the situation better. Besides I could easily have done the same thing myself. We are bad parents. Bad.
Now that it is done, we lie for a while longer in heavy silence, before I ask, “Do you know which box you dropped?”.
“No.”
Each of us is doing the calculation. There is a one in three chance that the box that fell was the one that housed the seeds that might have been sterile. There is the same chance that lying broken on the ground beneath a pile of potting mix and pots are our tiny green sprouts, our fragile insurance against the future.
“Don’t look,” I say. Oh coward. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
More lying in the dark.
“I can’t bear it,” says Pete at last, and so we get up again and walk silently though the darkened house and Pete turns on the outside light, while I peer closely into the remaining two boxes. The leaves are not heart-shaped after all. They are like tiny kidneys, snuggled up in matching pairs. Back in bed we hold hands in the dark, relief pulsing between us, but for a long time neither of us can sleep. Pete is having flashbacks (the tipping; the sickening thump). When I finally doze I dream of misfortune and loss.
I am going to love this blog.
Thanks Mali – I’d better get planting!
Hells teeth – here we are in rain sodden and chilly London pulling self seeded oaks – still attached to their acorns – out of what passes for our lawn (at best it acquires a certain dignity in the summer months when the collection of weeds join up to provide a greenish carpet which is mowed flat periodically). Not even the wretched squirrels (grey US imports rather than the native ‘cute’ red ones and our equivalent of possums) will eat them. They eat everything else.
Still the initiative is applauded and we shall enjoy following the blog wherever it goes.
But isn’t it too late for seedlings where you are? I’m too literal. Sigh.
I have similar thoughts, except yours are expressed much more eloquently.
By the way, I really enjoyed your book…
Thanks Helen. Yes, I was starting to feel paralysed with fear – which is why this feels very nice to do!
So happy to be here. (Of course, after I read writing this good, I can barely write a sentence.)
Thanks Indigo – of course I still think I’m writing an essay – will loosen up in time!
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