Reach into the soil
Bare hand round brown root
Strain against the sucking clay
Pull up the weed.
Our garden has no soil- only the stickiness that cloys between rotting matter in other, more fertile grounds. Shards of clouded glass in place of stones, slivers of plastic, cheerily printed with leaf and flower, too warm to touch, not quite heavy enough.
Once, digging out a grave for a raised bed, I untangled children’s clothing from the prongs of a fork. A tiny grey and pink dress, small yellow knickers, rusted with mud. This has not been a family home for many years. I cannot picture the face of the girl who once tumbled through this place, dressed in grey and pink, glowing like a cloud. Such smallness frightens a woman not yet bearing child- something that springs from a seed, grows without direction, not knowing how.
As a girl I thought that plants grew from the ground upwards- emerging from chambers secreted beneath the earth, where they waited curled, and unwound into the air, inch by inch, as the seasons passed.
