Dormancy
All winter long, we surveyed our brittle yard from towering windows, biting our nails, looking at one another furtively. Bald spots like patchy beard growth dotted the hills. “What is happening?” we wondered aloud. We hoped, we prayed for germination.
Under the lodgepole and ponderosa pines, where my husband on his knees scraped the needles and scattered the seed, the soil hinted that grass would push through the frozen earth this time.
Across town, my fair-haired daughter, seed of mine, sat waiting and longing for a seed of her own.
The Earth’s lessons were certainly ours to be had: harvest. Around the world, sowing seemed to work for others as they gathered crops of cassava, plantains, sorghum, and soy. Women in saris as scarlet as the saffron they picked bent to caress and cut and tend.
Ours was a harvest that would not come.
Scarifying
Glaring at our scraggly yard, we blamed the rabbits, capering down hill and vale, around our footbridge, beneath withered bushes, under dry rocks. A delightful sight when they first arrived, but now a threat. A menace as they devoured roots and nibbled fledgling blades.
We banged on gray windows and hatched murderous plots: one gun too heavy to aim; another too light to matter. Was poison an option? We set up rock barricades and searched for solutions. Should we use coyote urine? And finally we sprinkled sulphuric powder to scare away the invaders.
Could this perhaps be what happened in my daughter’s inner parts–an all-out assault on something alien?
Lag Phase
No matter what we tried, the seed mutinied, intermittently hatching from the papery seeds in barren spaces under warm peat moss beds. There were days–no, weeks of standing with hose in hand, morning and night, to bathe the recalcitrant seeds. Rivulets of water seeping down the hills into rocky places.
Embryos lay fallow in our season of waiting. The promises of God wore thin. The promise of the harvest. We would reap what we sowed. The curse of barrenness. Wondering why others held their dough-faced babies against their breasts, but not us. The causality of sowing faithfulness but reaping nothingness birthed accusations.
Yes, we were called to wait and trust but we banged on windows anyway.
The law of the harvest seemed broken, as behind glass we peered at mothers who were too young or simply unhappy. The injustice of gifts for one but not for another. It was the drought that chapped our souls.
Each month, my daughter ached as she waited for the test to turn pink. Or was it blue? To turn her hopelessness into holding.
She asked me, “Why?” one day on our way to get pedicures, and I stared out the window and stupidly spewed platitudes. She, of course, clammed up–this is my daughter when angry.
Later, I asked her, “How? How can I support you?”
“It sucks, just say it sucks,” she said. There were no answers that would soothe. So I learned to embrace the sucking pain.
Emergence
Now here is yet another spring and yellow thatch sits atop our stubborn grass. Iris spathes peek from under chipped lava rock. Tulips burst from an earthen uterus and bob above ground. Here and gone too soon.
This spring, though, new life breaks forth. Creaking against the blackened timbers, our rainbow swing is no longer empty. This year, we hold a smiling babe in the spaces where we cried. She suckles at my daughter’s breast–my daughter, her mother! She searches our faces with eyes big and blue, as though she knows things we cannot. Our arms are full.
We now see the harvest through our spectrum of imperfection. Undulating pines beside our spotty grass. Rocks hewn by erosion. Crystal-clear skies. In the distance, snow-capped mountains stand watch.
Christine Yount Jones is the author of several nonfiction books and educational resources. Her work has appeared in more than one hundred publications, among them Metaworker Literary Magazine, The Roadrunner Review, and Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog. She will soon have an MFA from Lindenwood University. Learn more about her at christineyountjones.com.
