Hope Is Enough
It’s not the season to grow, and you still sow.
Yunior Rivas
The soil is frozen and hard, the air cutting against your skin. The ground whispers of frost not fertility, the skies pale and unpromising.
It’s not the season for planting. Anyone could see that.
Still, here you are, cradling seeds in your hand as though they are gems. You kneel, pressing each seed into a reluctant earth. Your tools blunt in the face of the icy ground, and your fingers cracked and stiff from the sharp wind. You persist.
The world doesn’t stop to admire your work. They pass by with their scarves pulled high and their heads tucked low, murmuring to themselves about your futility and their practicality. You don’t listen them.
The days drag on, frigid and unchanging, the seeds stay hidden. Weeks pass without so much as a hint of green. You wonder if they were right.
Long after you’ve stopped counting the days, you return. The snow has melted but the earth remains sterile. You scan the ground, every inch of it, searching for even the faintest trace of life.
There is nothing.
Your garden is still barren. It may always be. But as you rise to leave, brushing the dirt from your knees, you find that the emptiness doesn’t feel quite so hollow. You glance back at the plot of earth, at the invisible seeds sleeping beneath it, and something within you stirs.
What mattered wasn’t whether anything might grow. It was the way your breath hung in the air each morning as you returned to the garden, fragile clouds against the forceful cold. The way your hands ached from breaking a frozen earth, the way your heart stung each time the snow fell again, burying what little progress you thought you’d made. It was the tender ache of giving yourself to something that might never give back.
It was never flowers you were planting.