"I haven't ruled anything out," Callie said carefully. "But I don't want to sell land because I'm tired. That isn't the same as making a good decision."
Ruth was silent. Then she asked about Eli and whether he was sleeping enough. Callie told her he was doing well in school, that his math teacher had praised his weather graphs, and that they had found something extraordinary beneath the old corn crib. She described the seed collection without the excitement she had expected to feel, emphasizing the age of the kernels and the uncertainty around them.
"Your father used to say Silas knew things he never bothered to teach anybody," Ruth said after a pause. "I thought he meant the ordinary things men say about their grandfathers."
"Maybe he meant exactly what he said." Callie looked at a photograph on the refrigerator. It showed her father lifting Eli onto a tractor step before the boy was big enough to climb without help. "I wish he had told me more."
"So do I," Ruth answered. The softness of her voice made Callie stop sorting invoices. For a moment neither woman could find anything else to say that would not make the distance between Nebraska and Ohio feel enormous.
The extension office helped Callie arrange a limited trial using the surviving seedlings and a second group of the oldest kernels that had shown encouraging signs in preliminary testing. She had no intention of planting an entire acre, much less relying on the crop for income. The protected north-field corner was chosen because it was far from their main corn planting and had space for control rows that could receive the same documented care. Marianne warned that a trial this small could teach them about survival and handling but would not establish a commercial yield claim.
Callie agreed in theory. In practice, by the first warm week of May she was desperate to see something succeed. She cleared the corner too quickly, turned the soil while it was damp, and pressed ahead without allowing the surface to settle. Several seedlings were set deeper than their damaged roots could comfortably tolerate, while others went into ground already beginning to harden after a sharp, drying wind.
For three days she woke early to examine the plot. On the fourth, a few fragile leaves pushed through the soil, and relief came so suddenly that she nearly cried. On the seventh, the stand looked thin. By the end of the second week, some seedlings had yellowed, others had broken through a hard surface crust, and several never appeared at all.
She knelt beside one that had failed and loosened the surrounding soil carefully enough to see its distorted roots. The plant had not been taken by a dramatic disease or an obvious pest. Its roots simply had nowhere easy to go, and the shallow pocket of loose soil around them dried faster than the ground beyond it. Callie sat back on her heels, feeling the familiar weight of wanting something so badly that she had mistaken urgency for preparation.