by Ella Shively
I ferry eight bell pepper seedlings back to my hometown in the same styrofoam takeout box I sowed them in six weeks ago, when I still thought their fruits would brighten the window of my college dorm. I pressed the little seeds into the damp soil on a day when home was just a passing thought, a place I came to visit every now and then. A college girl won’t cry on freshman move-in day, but if you send a college girl home early, she will surely cry.
The belles have grown too big for their box. My father bestows upon me an empty tin that reads, “DELUXE MIXED NUTS” in unapologetic capitals. He’s punched six holes in the bottom, like stars. I rediscover the musty garden shed, where lives the garbage can my family emptied their flowerpots into at the end of the last growing season. I break apart the cloddy death masks of terra cotta pots to reveal the treasures that the soil hides: rocks and root balls, scraps of frayed fabric, perhaps a silver dollar if we’re lucky. I fill my tin with dirt that still retains the scent of harvests passed while I was gone.
I dig a burrow for each seedling in the soft cushion of soil inside the tin. I pry beneath the little sprouts, feeling each long taproot to its filamentous end. How strong, the grip of tiny roots upon a place they have outgrown; the tension like a fiddle string that’s tuned too tight. How vulnerable, the trembling of the pale, pliant stalk and dangling roots as the breeze arrests the seed leaves of the transplant in my hands. This newborn sprout half-remembers still the womb-like comfort of the underground; I cradle it in the heart line of my palm. I resettle the shoots the way my mother taught me, mixing the old dirt from the chambers of their germination with the fresh potting soil inside the tin, to comfort my bewildered plants with just a piece of home.
Ella Shively is a senior at Northland College studying writing and natural resources. Her work has been published in Prometheus Dreaming and Consonancie, and aired on Wisconsin Public Radio. Her pepper plants are alive and well. You can find her on Instagram @shivelywrites.
