She pressed her hands flat against the soil and waited for it to be warm.
It wasn’t. March, still. The garden had thawed enough to take a shovel but not enough to feel like anything was alive underneath. She’d known this before she knelt. She knelt anyway.
The gloves were in her coat pocket. She left them there. You couldn’t feel warmth through gloves, and feeling warmth was the point — or the absence of warmth, which was also information.
Her neighbor’s daughter had planted sunflower seeds last October, pressing each one into the dirt with her thumb, explaining the process to no one. The girl did this every fall. The seeds never survived winter. Every spring she planted new ones and said they came back.
The distinction between “came back” and “were replaced” didn’t trouble the girl. It troubled no one but the woman kneeling in the cold dirt, her hands flat, waiting for heat that would arrive in its own time regardless of whether she waited.