The spring after the fire I went back to the garden expecting nothing. The beds were grey. The fence posts stood like burnt matches. I had come, honestly, to say goodbye to it.
Instead there was a shoot. One, right in the middle of the worst of it, the green so bright it looked rude. The gardeners at the nursery told me later that some seeds only open in heat; they wait, sometimes for years, for exactly the thing you would think would finish them. I keep that fact in my pocket now like a smooth stone. Not everything that burns is lost. Some of it is only waiting for the ground to cool enough to start again.