The Trike Returns:
Root
Marcia Mascolini
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Deep Roots
Ahn Lu knew his soil was played out. He also knew what he put into his garden and what he took out didn't balance. He harvested plump, crunchy onions from tired onion sets and succulent beans he did not remember planting.
Ahn rarely worked his soil. He sold his night soil allotment. Yet when he squeezed a handful of his brown-black soil, his fingers made ridges that quickly lost form when he opened his hand.
At a point exactly across the globe, LouAnn dumped her forty-seventh wheelbarrow of composted cow manure on a garden strip. Then she slumped on the grass. Clots of manure clung to her sweaty legs.
She looked at her garden. She reckoned she'd applied twenty tons of compost and manure to lighten her clay soil. Yet when she picked up a handful, it ran through her fingers in a meager stream.
LouAnn's onions were small and few bean seeds had flourished, but their roots ran deep. She pictured the roots and the enriched soil pushing through the magma at the center of the earth and coming out the other side. Lou Ann imagined some Chinese guy must have one great garden.
~Marcia Mascolini
Marcia Mascolini taught business writing for a hundred years at Western Michigan University. Now she writes another kind of fiction. It is much more fun. Email.
© 2002 by Marcia Mascolini. All Rights Reserved.
© Copyright 2002 by Cayuse Press. All Rights Reserved.
This page updated August 31, 2002.