Everyday miracle

When I was newly pregnant with my first child, Clare, I remember looking through the early spring crop of seed catalogues with fear in my heart. After all, so many seeds fail to grow. Some rot. Some push out tender green shoots and the snails finish them off. Some fail for unaccountable reasons, and you never even find the remains. It seemed improbable to me that any should grow at all and therefore unlikely that the cluster of cells inside me should grow to a healthy child.

Now spring has come around many times since then, and the child I couldn’t believe in, Clare, accompanies me on roller blades to the community gardens. She likes to do the watering. Most of the time she is still a little girl, and yet she is on the edge of adolescence. She wants to be an artist, she tells me, and to run a café. I will be allowed to come in for free coffee with my friends. I imagine it. Me on my zimmer frame or my walking stick, cluttering up her cool young space. Perhaps.

She likes gardening. Weeding leaves her cold (me too) but she loves the thought of seeds going into the ground and becoming something else. She likes to pluck a carrot out of the ground, rinse it under the hose and eat it before that just-picked sweetness disappears. To her, as to me, the growing of things seems a miracle. And I look at her, so lovely, muddy and unselfconscious, scar upon scar on her knees and her teeth proclaiming the future wealth of our orthodontist, and think that gardening proves just how everyday miracles can be.