In Every Seed, A Hope

Would you be the seed of your child's future?

Written by: Christopher Blake

Illustrated by: Yue Li

In the twilight glow after Rose’s 18^th birthday party, her mother and I swallow our seeds, hike into the back forty, and lay down under the flower moon waiting for the change.

I squeeze Lara’s hand and she squeezes back, her fingers feeling longer than usual, the skin rougher.

“She was so angry,” Lara whispers.

I kick at a clod of earth.

“What does she expect us to do?” I ask. “Run? Hide? Fight? There’s no running from this, Lara.”

Lara’s trying her best to be quiet, but the night is nearly silent, and I can’t help but hear her crying, wet tears irrigating the earth.

“She just wants her parents,” she begins. “She doesn’t understand how we could bring her into this world knowing…knowing…”

But she cannot finish, leaving each of us to our own thoughts.

Every child is a dream, a wish cast into uncertainty. Children have been born into war, into famine. Now, they are born into a climate rapidly unravelling. Every child is a dream, a hope that in the end everything will be okay. Everything will be okay, because it has to be.

“She’ll understand,” I say at last, my voice cracked like autumn leaves. “One day, she’ll understand.”

It’s not as if Rose was surprised. She couldn’t have been. We haven’t hidden anything from her. We couldn’t. It’s just the way things are. Christ, she’s seen her friends’ parents go through this. Her aunt and uncle are a stand of cedars by Bright Lake, for God’s sakes.

“Do you think?” Lara trails off. “Do you think she’ll ever forgive us?”

But my bronchi fill with phloem and my voice box hardens into bark, and all I can do is tangle the roots of my fingers into Lara’s and squeeze them one last time.

****

After that night, Rose doesn’t visit for four years.

Meantime, Lara and I spread with abandon, like some wanton invasive species. Once, this land had been an old growth forest, then orchards, vegetable patches, fields of wheat, tracts of GMO’d and pesticided corn. For the twenty years Lara and I owned it, we’d run a sustainable teaching farm, one way we tried to hold off what ended up being inevitable.

Now, the land hosts our many roots, grants us water and nitrogen and phosphorus and a chance anyway at some kind of life.

When Rose crests the hill and catches her first sight of us, she balls a fist.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she blurts.

But we can’t answer.

We’ll always be her parents, but we’ll never again be human.

Now, we are a field of roses.

Rose turns away and I feel her tears mixing with the earth. Through a chain of roots and bacteria, soil and mycorrhiza, I tell Lara to drink them herself. She’s had a harder time of all of this, has struggled more than I have with Rose’s absence. She needs some part of her daughter, any part, to nestle within herself again.

Eventually Rose turns back to us, looks down at the field of reds, whites, pinks, and yellows. She picked a good time to visit. We’re magnificent in June.

“How could you do this?” she asks. “How could you abandon your child?”

Even if I could answer her, which I can’t, it’s hard to know what I might say.

Because the only way a warming planet would let us have a child, just one child, was to offer ourselves up when that child came of age. Because humans spew CO2 just breathing, let alone driving cars and hopping planes. Because hybrids like us, human minds running vegetal synapses, can cleanse the air more efficiently than any natural photosynthesizer.

Because we’d wanted a child more than anything in the world and this was the price.

Because we’d dared hope that if we sacrificed, she wouldn’t have to.

But I don’t say those things.

I can’t.

Rose looks around, assessing, shuffling her feet in the earth.

“I graduated from college,” she says. “BSc Environmental Sciences.”

A gust of hot wind like an oven’s backdraft tosses her chestnut hair. Sweat streaks her brow and catches her right eye. She winces, then rubs it away. It is the height of greenhouse summer, the hottest Lara and I have ever felt.

Rose turns around, then takes one last look over her shoulder.

“With honours,” she whispers.

****

Two years later she comes back, then five years after that.

The first time to report her Master’s, the second her PhD.

For the Master’s, she doesn’t stay long, just discharges the daughterly obligation of the update, then trudges off, wiping tears.

But after the PhD, she gets chatty.

She sets out a picnic blanket and pours herself a little prosecco in a bioplastic champagne flute. For us, she scatters alfalfa meal fertilizer and empties a gallon of water.

“A peace offering,” she says. “Don’t misunderstand. I’m still pissed. But I’ve worked too long for this doctorate. I’ll be damned if I’m not celebrating with my parents.”

I can feel Lara’s shivers through the thrumming earth. In the places our roots intertwine, there is a frisson as a tension faintly ebbs.

The water is welcome too. It’s been an unusually dry July, even for these strange times.

Rose drains her glass at a gulp, then refills it and sips.

“My thesis studied the integration of human-plant hybrids into conventional ecosystems, and the implications for optimal carbon sequestration.”

She sips again and looks around.

“You two could do better.”

She gently rubs one of my leaves between her fingers, and I remember my little girl, grasping my hand at a crosswalk.

“I get that the whole field of roses was meant as a sweet tribute.” She drains her glass. “Though personally, it’s just fucking ghoulish. That aside, it’s inefficient. It would’ve been better to incorporate a little biodiversity.”

She bites her lower lip, like she does when she’s thinking something through.

“Since I own the land now, I’ll be making some changes. You better play nice with the new kids.”

****

As parents, Rose was our greatest project.

As hybrids, we’re hers.

However she feels about us, the farm is her work now, and so we begin to see her with some regularity. Her thesis netted her a coveted tenure track position at the local college and with sea levels still rising, there’s no shortage of grant funding for a program like hers. She moves back into the old farmhouse and recruits legions of undergrads to do her bidding.

She starts by hand-digging a pond near our patch, and seeding it with tadpoles. Then she sets out birdhouses and birdbaths.

“Natural pest control,” she says.

She talks as she works, as if she hopes we’re listening. Hearing her reminds me of the rolling patter I’d spout when she was a voiceless infant, unable to speak but still listening, growing.

Next, she introduces some companions.

One spring day, she guides out a group of middle-aged couples. They almost look like they could be off on some retreat, but of course they’re not. Her grad students shuffle them into their designated locations and hand them their seeds.

“I’ve run a battery of tests and assessed that your personalities will optimally complement one another,” says Rose. “Of course, this is all uncharted territory, but worst case scenario I’ll just transplant you all.”

The crowd laughs awkwardly.

Rose chuckles. “Oh,” she says. “You thought that was a joke.”

Every new hybrid has its purpose.

Steve and Rachel, dentists from Connecticut, grow into a verge of purple lavender, repelling aphids, rabbits, and deer, while attracting pollinators. Sarah and Alice, an accountant-librarian duo from Chicago, flower into alliums, preventing fungal black spot and sweetening our perfume as a pleasant side benefit.

“They also deter moles,” says Rose, which I’m pleased to hear. There’s been a family of them digging near Lara that Rose hasn’t managed to chase off.

Rose incorporates hybrids of catmint and Mexican marigolds, Russian sage and larkspurs. Between them they’ll chase off white flies and nematodes and those damn Japanese beetles. They look pretty too.

But the garden itself is just a small part of Rose’s overall plan. The majority of the property she devotes to stands of mixed forest. Red oak. Yellow poplar. Silver maple. Red and white pine.

“Far more efficient at carbon sequestration,” Rose explains, which I can’t help but take as a dig.

And so we settle into a rhythm of seasons. Of loamy spring rising from snowy winter, of blossoming summer fading into the stupor of fall. And as the years pass, the seasons grow no milder, but our stomata sense that the acceleration of the carbon concentration in the atmosphere has slowed, then stalled. What we’re doing, what Rose is doing, it’s a drop in the bucket, but somewhere out there other drops must be falling too.

At night, sometimes, I hear her talking to herself, chatting to the gardens, whispering to Robert, the man she one morning sheepishly introduced as her fiancé, shortly after he’d mistakenly plucked a flower from Lara to offer Rose. Not the best introduction, but we’ve warmed to him since.

We hear the two of them sometimes: debating, arguing, wishing that Lara and I were there to talk to, that Robert’s parents were too. Despite all our sacrifices, the future we had hoped to grow for her, a future where humans might once again welcome healthy children to the world without risking ecological apocalypse, had yet to come to pass. Parents were still forced to offer themselves up as payment for the lives of their children. One day, perhaps, it wouldn’t need to be so, but how far in the future would that day come? And would it come too late?

There is never any answer to such questions. There never can be. So Rose simply throws herself into her work, day after day after month after year: indefatigable, relentless. But sometimes, we catch her sitting silently amongst us, her eyes closed, her fingers brushing against our petals, as if trying through force of will alone to reach into our hearts, to pull advice from whatever is left of our minds, but of course no advice can come.

And then one Autumn day she disappears.

At first we think perhaps she has taken some secret sabbatical, will surely return by spring. But when the vernal equinox comes and goes, when the summer solstice slips away and the shrinking days slowly signal the return of winter, we begin to worry. Through our mycorrhizal networks, we check with neighbouring flowers, send messages as far as the silver maples at the far treeline, but no one has seen her.

We begin to panic, wilting from fear as much as heat.

And then one September day she returns, returns with someone new, a tiny someone wrapped in swaddling clothes.

“This is June,” says Rose, “My daughter.”

Lara’s roots thrill against mine at the sight of this beautiful, perfect granddaughter, thrill that the laws must have been lifted, that finally we may know that what we did was right, that our sacrifice was worthwhile. That we have given up our lives so that our daughter and her daughter might have lives of their own.

But Rose isn’t done, her voice only catches as she lets a single tear fall.

“And I will love her as long as I’m human, and after too. Perhaps, in time, we can bring this planet far enough back that I can take my seeds not as an early penance, but as a final mercy at the end of a long life. But if not, then one day I hope she’ll understand her mother’s choices. I hope she’ll understand the love and the hope that brought her into this world. And I hope she’ll forgive me.”

She pauses and I feel the earth tremble beneath her shaking feet.

“Like I forgive you.”

---

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