The Shepherd's Purse
She walks the same road every morning, and along the edge of it there is a strip of nothing that used to be a field.
The field is a parking lot now. Grey, flat, and honest about it. But the strip between the lot and the ditch still holds what the field was made of, and the field was made of weeds, and the weeds have not been told.
So every morning from the middle of June to the middle of October she picks the little triangle pods off the shepherd's purse and tips them into a tobacco tin. Each pod rattles like a very small purse with one coin in it. She fills the tin in about eleven mornings. Then she starts another tin.
The tins live in her kitchen window, thirty of them, the sun going through them amber.
Nobody has ever asked to buy a tin. Weed seed is not a thing people buy. She knows this. She is not confused about the market.
In November, when the lot is finished and swept and the lines are painted fresh white, she walks out at first light and scatters one tin along the edge, in the seam where the asphalt meets the grass, and walks home.
In April, the lot crew comes with the string trimmer and takes it all down to the soil.
She scatters another the next November. She has been doing this for nine years. Sixteen tins down. She does not count it as a loss. A loss would be if she expected them to stand and they fell. What she expects is the trimmer. What she plants against is the day the trimmer stops coming.
The morning the thing changed, a boy on a bike stopped on the shoulder and watched her shake a pod into her palm.
“What's that,” he said.
“Field seed,” she said. “This was a field.”
“It's a parking lot.”
“It was a field first.” She held out her hand. “This one's shepherd's purse. Little heart-shaped pods. In June they're full of the tiniest seeds you've ever seen. Like sand, if sand were alive.”
He looked at her hand a long time, the way children do when they are deciding whether an adult is joking.
Then he said, “Can I have some.”
She gave him a handful. All of it. He put it in his jacket pocket, where it made a small dry sound, and rode off, and she did not ask him his name or what he planned to plant it in or whether he would really plant it.
That is not what a handful of seed is for. A handful of seed is not a promise. It is a thing that might happen somewhere you will never stand.
She went home with an empty palm and wrote in her book: today the tin went out sideways instead of down.
Around the corner of the lot, where she cannot see it from the road, that boy's mother has a raised bed with three tomatoes in it and no room for anything else, and the seed will sit in the pocket until the jacket goes into the wash, and then it will sit in the lint trap, and then in the bin.
Or he will walk a mile out of his way in March and press it into the dirt behind the school with his thumb, one at a time, and not tell anyone.
She will never know which. That is the whole shape of it. That is the part she likes.
The morning after the boy, she walked past the lot and did not even look at the strip. She looked at her own hands instead, which were empty and stained green at the knuckles from the pods, and she thought about how a thing you cannot watch is the only kind of thing you can give away completely.
Then she went home and started tin thirty-one.
