make her feel better every time she passed. Sometimes it made her cry. But she was beginning to understand that making a new life did not require erasing the old one, and for the first time the seed shelves did not seem like an intrusion on Walter's memory. They seemed like something he might have pulled up a chair to help with.
The third spring began with a letter from the county road department announcing repairs on the bridge Mary Ann used to reach town. She read the notice over breakfast, calculated the longer route to the feed store, and set it beside the garden plan. She had started noticing logistical details again, the kind of small practical calculations she once made automatically when cattle needed feed or a pasture gate was damaged. The old part of her mind had not disappeared with Walter. It had been waiting for a reason to come back to work.
She started seed earlier that year, but not all at once. Yellow Stripe and Dark Shoulder went into carefully labeled trays first, followed by Red One and Little Paste several days later. The remaining experimental lines occupied a smaller space because she had made a deliberate decision not to give every seed equal attention. There was no glamour in the decision; it simply meant more room, more light, and less wasted effort for the plants most likely to teach her something useful.
When the seedlings emerged, Mary Ann sat on a kitchen stool and counted them one by one. She recorded which groups sprouted evenly and which lagged, then made a second count after the risk of damping off had passed. The differences were not as dramatic as she had once hoped, but the results were noticeably more consistent than those first chaotic strips behind the shed. She gave herself permission to feel pleased without declaring victory.
In April she invited Lena to inspect the trays and the proposed field layout. Lena asked questions Mary Ann could now answer with dates rather than guesses. They discussed isolating the candidate lines, keeping pollen movement in mind, and avoiding the assumption that a single favorable harvest meant a variety was fully stabilized. Mary Ann had prepared a page of questions about seed viability and storage; for the first time, she was not embarrassed to have more questions than answers.
"I thought you'd tell me to buy ordinary seed and save myself the trouble," Mary Ann said.
"If your goal was a dependable crop this summer, I might," Lena answered. "But you're doing selection work, and that has a different purpose. Just don't mistake a promising family of plants for a finished one."
"How will I know when it's finished?"
"When you've grown it enough times, kept records, and seen the qualities repeat consistently. You'll know more next year than you do now. Then more the year after that."
Mary Ann wrote the answer down, although she did not like how open-ended it was. She had learned from the cattle that animals did not develop on a schedule merely because a farmer had written one. Apparently tomatoes were no different. She returned to her work with the uncomfortable freedom of having no certain finish date.