We planted a garden in the fullness of springtime hope, imagining the long unfolding of summer in the high mountains. After plowing and the first three waters, work grows lighter for two months or so, as the crops grow and the sun’s arc stretches long. Every five days each field needs to be watered; weeds must be pulled, animals cared for. But for the most part summer feels like a long, deep breath between the intensity of spring and fall works.
But just after our garden was fully formed and seeded, we got word that the government of India had changed their visa policies, and our tourist visas would cease to be valid by midsummer. We made some pleas for recourse or special permission, but in the end it was no good– we had to go.
Don’t worry, our friends told us– we will water your field, water your garden. It’s always our hope that our presence lightens the burden of work for our friends here, and not adds to it. We don’t mind, they told us. Truly. Make your hearts light, and go– and then, quickly, return.
We boarded a plane to travel in early June, walking down the valley as the first of the umbu flowers began to bloom, and before the first roses. As we said goodbye to Abi Rinchen, she told us “It’s not fair– you’ve just worked so hard, and now you will go when we rest, and come back for more work.” But so it had to be.
Sprouts, and water
The Indus river, when we left…
And when we returned seven weeks later…
Seven weeks: a lifetime, in some ways, and no time at all. Enough to recall us to the gravity of our commitments both here and on the other side of the world, enough to reconnect for precious days with some of the people dearest to us. Enough to make sure that our nieces and nephews remember us, and know how much we love them. Enough to work, hard and steadily, to take care of some essential things at our homeplace back in Maine. Enough for our possessions to mold a little in this summer’s endless rains, our skin to rehydrate, our desert-baked hearts to grow sodden, our eyes to see clearly the way that water is life.
Enough time for the sun to strike the glaciers and send meltwaters rushing down every valley, carrying soil, silt, stone, sediment, down into the river and towards the Arabian Sea. Enough time for vegetables to grow, weeds to thicken, the wheat in our field to rise from shin-high sprouts to long fine stalks as high as my chest.
Ache Tashi watered our field along with hers just above it, both relying on the same canal. She said she didn’t mind– she thought about us while she did it, wished us safe journeys and quick return. She is taking care of so many things, stretched between her responsibilities in the village and caring for each of her two sons, at school in different places.
Konchok made his way up to the upper village at least once a week among all his other works, to bring water to our garden. He dug out more manure too, he told us, to top-dress the cabbages and potatoes. We could barely see the vegetables when we first arrived back, beneath the weeds– but after an afternoon’s effort, we were amazed by how well and strong almost everything remained.
Our lives here feel like a miracle of collective tending.
Now it is almost October, and I have the acute pleasure of going out to pick food for dinner each evening before I start to cook. We dug new potatoes for breakfast the day we harvested our field; soon we’ll dig a pit to store root vegetables in through the winter.
The corn struggled the most through its long summer of partial neglect, and for some weeks I was afraid it might not ripen seed at all. I had planted all the seeds I had (the old people are always wise enough to save some back!): a four-year-old lineage of different seed gifts that grew and got married on the land where we live in Maine. Each year they have shown themselves in different wonderful patterns of red and purple and gold, bringing beauty, nourishment, delight.
I consoled myself with the thought that Shiwa planted corn at our home in Maine this year, and if these seeds didn’t continue, others would.
But just a week ago I went out to pick a few shucks from the smallest, saddest corn; and found within the leaves a tiny cob with fat and shining kernels, purple-black, nearly ripe. Wild spring hopes and summer worries, kind tending of friends, and attention just in time (if none too soon). This corn family will continue on I think, changed by its time in these high mountains, glacial waters, desert sun: faced with difficulty, and made more resilient that way.
