She had no grand plan that day. She was not looking at a future seed business, a market stall, or customers in places she had never visited. She was looking at an enormous number of seeds and remembering the way her grandfather used to save a handful from each good tomato. She crouched beside the pile, pulled back the edge of the plastic liner, and picked up a small pinch between her fingers. The seeds were slick and nearly weightless, yet they held something the cannery had no intention of using.
Her grandfather, Samuel Beale, had grown tomatoes behind a two-room house that smelled every summer of hot dust, dill, and canning jars. He was a patient man except when people wasted food or interrupted him while he was counting saved seed. Mary Ann had been nine when he showed her how the seed collected in a jar looked different after the surrounding gel broke down. He never explained the biology in a way she could have repeated at school, but he spoke about choosing seed with a gravity normally reserved for choosing a spouse.
"Anybody can buy seed," Samuel would say. "Knowing which ones are worth keeping, that's the part most people skip."
Mary Ann remembered his stained fingertips and the sour smell of the jars lined along his back step. She remembered watching him separate seeds that looked nearly identical to her while he spoke about the plants they had come from. She remembered that he could identify a good tomato vine from the road, sometimes before the fruit had colored. But she could not remember every step of his method, and memory alone was a poor substitute for instructions.
She went inside, found an old notebook among Walter's receipts, and wrote a date on the first page. Under it she wrote: Cannery tomato seed. Unknown varieties. First trial behind shed. The letters looked awkward, as though she were recording an event that might turn out to be embarrassing. She added a final sentence, smaller than the others: See what happens.
That was the beginning, although she would not understand it as a beginning for a long time.
At the feed store on Monday, Evelyn noticed the mud on Mary Ann's boots and asked whether she had finally decided to clear the back pasture. Mary Ann said she was trying a garden. Evelyn brightened and immediately offered her a discount on tomato transplants. When Mary Ann explained where the seeds were coming from, Evelyn stopped smiling.
"Those cannery leftovers?" she said.
"The seeds in them."
"Honey, they don't throw those away because they're the good ones."
"Maybe not."
"And you'll have no idea what varieties you're getting."
"That's true."
Evelyn considered her for a moment, then pushed a pair of discounted garden gloves across the counter. "You're going to need these, whatever you're doing. Pay me when you know what you're growing."