germination

by katie ferrari

it feels good to be alone. the apartment clean, all my energy my own again. a new altar for a new season: a tray of seeds. a reminder to the corner of my eye, the back of my mind that time has passed. i cannot go back to the past and choose a different path to walk down to try to make the sweetness last. time has moved. the days are longer now. i am not who i was then.

moonflowers. i will sit beside them as they open in the summer evenings, at many homes, including my home under the stars. this home will be like the one i had all those years ago, at the farm i worked at after i’d been living out of my car for six months. it was a shame i slept in my tent at that farm. that was the year before i met the sierras, before i learned the bliss of nothing between myself and sky at night. to sleep with the milky way.

i planted 12 of them. all those years ago that i am trying to flip back into in a new way, yanick and i planted moonflower seeds in sister woods, like the little girls we had not gotten to be, but they did not germinate. seeds the size of a child’s biggest tooth may still be there in the black loam of the dark forest floor beneath the stained glass green of sun through maple and beech leaves. they are waiting in the soil for the sun’s rays to shine down on them in the specific way that beckons the radicle to push through the seed coat, down into the dark soil, down deeper and deeper until its descent begins to push the top of itself up, out of the soil, to greet the sun. have i gone deep enough to greet the sun?

or we, fresh from the city, still learning to see and move through a new dimension, a world with no sidewalks, no marked trails, trees and mounds as waypoints, could not find them again.

i’ll sit beside them with beloveds, with my beloved, with myself. each way will be a delight. i will sit beside them and inhale their sweet fragrance and feel it travel down each side of the front of my neck to my collarbones, slowing my breath, distilling me into the moment.

i filled the 72 cell seed tray with the bag of potting soil that is always in my kitchen, that sometimes i sit on when i have two friends over and they are sitting on the two stools. i thought of how we used to fill the seed trays from horse troughs full of potting soil that the farmer bought pallets of. how we would press the soil down in all the cells at the same time by pressing another full tray on top of the one we had just scooped soil over in the trough. instead, i used one of the 6 packs i’d filled with soil to press the others down. then, like at the farm, i watered the soil before adding any seeds.

i cut open the packet of moonflower seeds and went back farther in time to the year before, the farm before. to the seed room: cramped and crowded, dusty wooden floorboards creaking, shelves full of trays of seedlings stretching towards grow lights. to the seed room, where i learned how to tip the scales toward life. sister emanuelle ended her lesson by telling me to pray over each seed as i pressed it into the soil. she padded down the hallway to her bedroom and left me to work. i was happy to be alone and looked forward to working my way into the satisfying trance of repetition. the one thing holding me back was my frustration with her instructions to pray over each seed. i had just gotten free of god, i had just been excommunicated. i was never going to pray to that god again. she had not, though, told me what to pray or who to pray to. these were the first seeds i had ever planted, and i was tasked with planting 20 trays of 72 cells, mostly cabbages and kales. i wanted desperately to walk up the stairs in a few days and pull back the curtain on the bookcase the trays were kept in and see little shoots of green poking up through the soil. i wanted to pull each tray out and walk down the hallway to place it under the grow lights. i wanted to do it again and again, and then i wanted to see their cotyledon leaves unfurl. sister emanuelle had explained those would fall off when the seedling’s first two true leaves came in. i wanted to see the true leaves of red russian kale splay like purple baby fingers. what if the seeds didn’t germinate if i didn’t pray over them?

i stood at the wooden counter in my kitchen, looked out the window at the trees and the three-story redwood stairs at the back of the victorian next door. the late afternoon sun looked at me from the point in the sky where it could shine through the stairs, through the window, through the sun catcher, to splash rainbows on the seed tray, on me. there was soil under my nails and in the grooves of my hands again, there was soil on the floor. from my mouth came the echo of the prayer i had learned in the seed room: “may you become that which you are.”

katie ferrari writes personal essays, poetry, and fiction. her work traces the warp and weft of the personal and political and explores animism, relationship to the land, liberation, and community. she has been a public interest journalist, middle school english teacher, and organic vegetable farmer. her writing has been published in the bureau of complaint and nominated for best of the net.