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Planting
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by Jacqueline Ostrowicki
They worked together on the yard, the little family, sweating and dirt streaked. The father bent over, intent on helping his daughter plant her tiny grass seeds. They always did this in the spring: tilled a tiny vegetable garden, dug up the flowerbeds, patched the holey places in the grass.
Many times, they didn’t even live at a place long enough to see the shivering seedlets straighten. But no matter how many places they lived or how many times they moved, springtime was a ritual: all of them, bent over the damp earth, coddling it, requesting it to nurture their offerings. It mattered deeply somehow, this planting. Not as an effort to beatify the house for the next people—the houses were always rentals.
Somehow, the act of planting had become as symbolic as the actual growth. It was a living in the moment, a way to bond that made no sense to anyone else, because the planting was for no other purpose but to be together. It was a surrender to time, a realization that it is only the present that one truly possesses. This is the reason they were digging, using rusty garden spades, the daughter clutching a green plastic watering can in her small hand.
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Jacqueline Ostrowicki
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