Seeds
by Bo Fu
The plants wave their fruits at the sky. When the first rays of
sunlight hit them, their leaves swell and spring as if lifted by invisible
strings. I am already up by the time the sun arrives, hobbling between the
rows of plants with my watering can and shears to survey each stalk and
flower. We gardeners are a prideful race. Each plant has its peculiarities,
its moods, its longings. Left to themselves, they will tear themselves apart
like a pack of hungry children.
My garden lies on a half-acre of land. A hut sits in the corner, and
plants fill the rest of the space. There is no fence, so my garden mingles
with the dandelion and thistle and crabgrass at the edges. Some gardeners will tear out their hair at that, but I have always felt that weeds help
enforce discipline in unruly gardens, and my plants are certainly unruly,
despite their likeness: a single stem with five whorls of leaves, bearing a
single fruit. The fruit is the precious thing. Some are red, some green,
some round, some square, some smooth, some coarse – no two fruits are
alike in the way no two stories are alike. In the afternoons, I water the
plants, kill pests, snip away diseased leaves, mulch the soil, and in the evenings, when the light is gone, I do all that and more with an oil lantern
in one hand, stooping close to see the plants with eyes that have begun to
fail me in my age.
Sometimes, so rarely that I cannot pinpoint the frequency, I hear
the rattling of wheels from a ways off. I don’t know how they hear about
my little half-acre of the world, but they come, still, intermittently as
summer rain. I hear it now as I make my rounds, or maybe I feel it more
in the rumbling of the earth. When the car pulls up in front of my plantation, the visitor gets out a