Mounds

The horizon is dark. Clouds are gathering, pulsing with flashes of lightning. She tucks a strand of long dark hair behind her ear and jabs her trowel into the caked soil. She breaks the largest clods with her hands and mounds it up, patting it tight around a cluster of seeds. Zucchini. She scoots over, jabs, mounds, pats. She repeats the motions over and over. Her thighs and lower back ache. She surveys the rows of mounds that contain corn, squash, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes and thinks standing up might be worse. At the far edge of the garden is a dividing line of green between the bare soil and the dry grasses, shrubs and trees beyond. Garlic planted last fall.

The mounds are a necessity. As rain became fewer and far between, showers became torrential downpours and washed her neat rows of seeds away. The alternative arrived through trial and error, planting and replanting, with each rendition the fear of losing the remaining seeds more pronounced, the need more urgent. Every replanting more desperate as she tried to recall everything she had ever learned, read, or seen about gardening. Her memories of planting next to her mother, no longer relatable, nor were the magazines she leafed through admiring glossy pictures, or any programs she had watched. Exhausted, half asleep she felt she had lived this moment before, and has a fleeting thought of a passage in The Poisonwood Bible. “Mounds”, she thinks as she drifts off to sleep. “I need to plant the seeds in mounds”. The mounds survived the torrential rains, the water pooling and washing through the gullies in between.

She feels the memory of smooth paper against the palms of her hands, and wishes for an opportunity to read words on a page. So many mounds. She stabs the earth, forms it, and pats it down. The air contains electricity. The wind carries the smell of damp earth. She lifts the spade and with the sound of tiny rocks scraping the metal she is suddenly angry. A blinding, all consuming fury, which escapes as she screams: “Why is everything so hard?” Everything. Life. Surviving. The need to keep surviving. Why does she keeps digging, mounding, planting, season after season? How many seasons has it been?

She is shocked by the sound of her own voice. It reverberates in her ears. Echoes through her head. The anger is displaced, just as suddenly, with a profound emptiness and quiet. She realizes how long it has been since she heard a voice, any voice, including her own. She stabs the dry earth, mounds, tucks in a seed, and moves on.

She remembers the realization that her parents weren’t coming home. That she waited even longer hoping she was wrong. She stayed until the cupboards were empty, the radio stations filled with white noise, and the TV with static. The memory of that time in between stretches to forever, but it was less than a few weeks when she gave up adjusting nobs, fiddling with the rabbit ears, and then all switches in her house suddenly did nothing. She packed, repacked and rearranged her backpack. Changed her mind on what she needed, would take, and could carry. She debated for days which shoes to take. Changed her mind. She delayed leaving for no reason. She stayed for the same. She walked out of her backdoor when the noise of looting reached her street.

The low and distant rumble moves closer. The change so slow that it has been almost imperceptible but now is oppressively close. The first drop of rain darkens the ground. She needs to finish. She jabs the spade quickly: one, two, three, and four. She drops it and shifts her weight to her heals. Gently she tugs the thin chain from the collar of her shirt. The locket is warm, the same temperature as her body. With dirt packed fingernails she pries open the heart shape and shakes a few pale, thin, almost fleshy seeds into the palm of her hand. The photographs are faded. A young man who mischievously squints at the camera. A young woman fully captivated by the toddler whose fingers are entwined in her long dark hair.

She misses them.

The drops of rain are cold. She snaps the locket shut, terrified that the rain will wash away all that is left of her parents, and focuses on the seeds in her palm. Cantaloupe: her favorite and the last seeds to be planted before the rains. Hurriedly, she drops the seeds into the ground and firms up the mounds: one, two, three, and four. She tucks the locket back her shirt, secures that strand of hair behind her ear, picks up her spade, and stands. The world sways as if a too heavy weight suddenly fell from her shoulders. She is dizzy. She closes her eyes, stands still, and waits for the motion to settle. The drops amass into sheets of rain and are indistinguishable from the tears of hope streaming down her face.

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