The Moonbraider

If GMO Cookies is your strain, this is your sign: the Moonbraider. The walled garden after moonrise, the gate latched behind you, the garlic standing up silver in its rows, and you walking them slowly with the wheelbarrow, deciding which bulbs are worth keeping.

The walled garden behind the shut house, a full-moon night. Scapes in the night wind, braids turning on their strings, and the moon clear above the wall. Five-second loop.

If GMO Cookies is your strain

You do your best work after the gate is latched. Other people garden by day, with radios and opinions; you wait for the moon to clear the wall, pull on the long coat and go out with the wheelbarrow once the garden has stopped performing for anyone. At night the rows tell the truth, and the smells come up out of the ground honest. You like that about them.

You go slowly, and you go by nose. You walk a row the way other people read a letter, stopping, bending, coming back to a line you passed, and you can tell a good bulb from a great one before it is out of the ground. You are not fussy, exactly. You will braid the ordinary ones, hang them in the shed and give them away by the armful. You simply cannot pretend they are keepers.

At your best you are the person who makes the strong thing welcome. The pungent, savory, unfashionable thing that everyone else steps around, you lift it, braid it and hang it where the air moves, and by winter half the town is knocking at the gate for a string of it, including the ones who complained about the smell in July. You are generous with everything you grow and stingy only with the seed stock.

Your flaw is that you keep too many. Every autumn you swear you will replant only the best, and every autumn the keeper bed grows by another row, because this one had a good smell and that one tried so hard and the small one in the corner reminded you of somebody. The people who love you have stopped counting the braids in the shed. They just bring more string.

What you need is a clear, cool night, a wall between you and the street, and someone who will hold the barrow steady while you decide, without asking how much longer. Give you that, and the garden gets its keeper.

Your hour: After moonrise
Your place: The walled garden behind the shut house
Your object: A braid of garlic
Your tempo: One row, then back along it
Your weather: A clear, cool, full-moon night
Your flaw: You keep too many

Your people

The Funky Gourmet (Blue Cheese)The Funky Gourmet asks for the strongest braid every winter, for his parties. You give it to him. He is the only one who has never asked you to grow something milder.
The Night Owl (Purple Urkle)The Night Owl keeps the redwoods, you keep the rows. You work the same hours and you both know that night is when things tell the truth.
Cindy at Midnight (Cinderella 99)Cindy has to be gone by midnight; midnight is when you get going. You have passed each other at the gate a hundred times, one of you running and one of you not.

Things you say

The moon is light enough.
Keep the strong one.
Nothing good was ever braided in a hurry.
If it smells like that, it stays.
Supper before sweets.

A scene from your world

Lifting night

The Moonbraider latches the gate at moonrise and the street goes away. On this side of the wall there is only the garden: long raised beds of garlic standing up silver, the scapes curled like question marks, the old brick still giving back a little of the day’s warmth, and the drying shed at the far end where last week’s harvest hangs in braids, turning slowly on their strings. She does not bring a light. The moon is enough. It has always been enough.

Tonight is lifting night for the last bed, the one by the east wall, which went in last autumn from a single net bag of bulbs that came over the sea with a label nobody in town could read. The bed did not behave. It came up early and grew tall and strange, its leaves twisting as if somebody had tinkered with them, and it smelled so strongly all summer that the neighbors asked, politely, what exactly she was keeping out. She told them she was keeping it in.

She works down the row on her knees, loosening each bulb with her fingers and lifting it into the moonlight. Most are good. She brushes off the soil, lays them in the wheelbarrow in a neat heap and moves along. The wheelbarrow’s left wheel squeaks every third turn. She has meant to oil it for eleven years.

Halfway down, she stops. The bulb in her hand is not the biggest of the night, but its smell reaches her before it is clear of the ground: garlic, yes, and under it something like rain on a hot road, and under that something she has no word for at all. She holds it up to the moon. On the wall, the garden cat stops washing to look. Somewhere past the gate a dog sneezes, twice.

Everything else in the barrow will be braided by the end of the week, hung in the shed and handed over the gate by the string all winter. Not this one. She wraps it in her scarf, the good cream wool one, and sets it on the wall by the gate, apart from the rest. In October it goes into the keeper bed, clove by clove, and the keeper bed will be one row longer than she promised.

Then she goes back for the rest of the row, because the rest of the row still needs lifting, and the moon will not wait, and the barrow, squeaking every third turn, is only half full.

The walled garden

The gate: Wrought iron, arched, latched at moonrise. It squeaks once on the way in and once on the way out, and never in between.
The long beds: Raised rows of garlic that stand up silver under the moon, scapes curled like question marks. Planted in autumn by the cold, lifted in summer by the moon.
The drying shed: Open on three sides so the air can move. The braids hang from its beams for weeks, turning on their strings, and the smell carries to the end of the street.
The wheelbarrow: Wooden, older than the shed, with a left wheel that squeaks every third turn. It holds exactly one row, if you heap it.
The keeper bed: The short bed by the east wall where the best bulbs go back in every October. It is always one row longer than it was meant to be.
The wall: Old brick under ivy, warm long after dark. The garden cat walks the top of it at night and inspects the harvest from above.