Chapter Four

"Life has its ways to keep us humble, just when we take most pride in our accomplishments we find out that everything we've done has been done before, often better. We pour all our spirit and our energy into an endeavor and it inevitably falls short, yielding to the limitations of our human condition on this Earth."

"There is no point in becoming dejected, living in the flesh is but an imperfect reflection of our hopes and dreams and we are always bound to leave our work unfinished so future generations can continue it.  Don't take yourself too seriously and heed the wise advice of the Ecclesiastes: eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do."

 

A little weedy sprout sprung up at first, then a scraggly plant of undetermined provenance, then finally a soybean bush. Sarah was beaming with pride. She really wanted to keep the thrill of success to herself but it was written all over her face.

What nobody expected, not in their most ambitious dreams, was how fast the plants were growing, nothing short of magic, with an accelerated rhythm that made their head spin and made them double check their grasp on reality. After a week they had a full crop cover. After three weeks pods were sprouting everywhere. After a month they had a harvest. After eight weeks they were well on their way for the second one.

"This is great, Sarah" Seth said, in a firm voice that tried but didn't succeed to conceal excitement. "With just a little more work you are bound to have a tomato patch just like sister Joseph's."

The overwhelming enthusiasm that swept through Sarah's psyche flattened out like a soufflé pulled out of the oven too fast. She revisited the mental picture of the tomatoes, trying to recall what they looked like, but couldn't remember anything out of the ordinary. Her surprise turned to chagrin and then very quickly to anger, a frothing mental anguish so intense that she didn't even question the word 'sister' at the end of the sentence. All the back breaking work of the last six months came to her mind and made blood shoot up to her cheeks and reflect a wild light in her eyes, a light that would have made a normal person run for cover.

Seth was not a normal person, as normal goes, and she didn't even blink, as if Sarah's reaction was the most natural thing in the world. Sarah would have liked to scream at Seth and claw her face - "do you mean to tell me that I lived with stench and worms for six whole months when you had the answer all along?!" as her anger grew more and more inflamed, pumping plenty of hot air back into her emotional soufflé and puffing it back up. She didn't have to say a word, every droplet of outrage and fury was showing on her face. The leader seemed amused, in a weird way even pleased with Sarah's annoyance.

"Don't be upset, we couldn't tell you how to do it, this was the whole point of the experiment. Every one of us came into success in her own way. You don't even want to know how sister Abigail made her crook neck squashes grow. Anyway, it took sister Joseph three years to bring her tomatoes to this state, so you should be pleased."

Now the word 'sister' read loud and clear and the rage in Sarah's eyes turned quickly to surprise and then intense curiosity.

"We are a religious order, dear", sister Roberta said kindheartedly, all a smile and brimming with contentment.

"I knew it", Sarah thought, there was no way to mistake that familiar walk, that detached attitude, that quiet way of life for anything else. She didn't even question how her life led her to this and why of all the paths in existence her footsteps took her full circle to the herb fragrant kitchen of her childhood, as if she walked on the thin wire of a helix and ended up in the same spot but one level up.

"Why am I here?", Sarah gathered the nerve to ask.

"As I said, this is an international experimental horticulture program and we are a teaching community, but you are here because you have both the education and green thumb instincts that would push you to try things that have not been tried before. After all, the medium you are cultivating is not exactly of this earth."

 

***

 

Everything else stopped in its tracks as the whole group started discussing combined methods of watering and fertilization, made suggestions of what to plant and predicted outcomes. If one wanted to find a word to describe the brick colored crumbly mix it would have been perfect; it had an ideal composition and proportion of minerals and the now slightly gritty particles offered a strong foundation for the little plants to sink their roots into.

The planting started just as prosaic as it's always been but on an accelerated schedule to keep up with the needs of the fast growing plants.

It took some getting used to seeing five foot tall green onions and tomato chords looped twelve times around the plot as they kept growing. They braided the green bean vines and twisted them into vegetal ropes, thick as their forearms, and spun them overhead, winding them between plots and across walkways, weaving them into a connected green openwork without an apparent beginning or end. Some of the open loops attracted the many birds of the neighborhood and between the nests and the clusters of hanging fruit from various other plants that started using the openwork for support the lacy green second surface took on a life of its own, a brave new world within arm's reach, floating over head like the miraculous suspended gardens of Semiramis.

They had to be on continuous duty to prune enough openings into this luxuriant green blanket to ensure the space below it still received enough sunlight.

The birds flocked in the sky above the experimental farm, finding comfort and shelter in this unusual man made jungle, and their colorful noisy groups attracted the curiosity and photographic interest of neighbors and tourists alike, making it difficult for the sisters to work around the crowds that seemed to devise ever more innovative means to find their way back into the quasi-cloistered garden.

Sarah walked through the racket of this three dimensional green space with strange detachment, her flame colored hair catching every ray of sunshine and reflecting it amplified, like an angelic vision in the garden of Eden, charting progress, recording growth patterns and anticipating results.

At the end of the year the documentation, statistics and developmental research were sent to the Space Science Agency in New Orleans, accompanied by Seth and Sarah who for lack of well needed time became appendices to the study. They went there to serve as footnotes, source documentation, amendments and errata wrapped into a couple of walking reference desks, two little human libraries from whom data and research could be drawn and added to the study as needed.