From the Wrong Side
At home the growing ground is below the last step. You sit on the steps and you are looking at it. Nobody made it that way. The steps go down toward the fog because that is where the fog is, and the ground between the bottom step and the fog is where things grow, because that is where the fog stands longest, and that is all there is to it.
The ground is cupped. Each hollow holds one thing. On the low side of each there is a lip, poured, which keeps the fog in the hollow a little after it has gone down everywhere else. The lips wear and are poured again, in the mineral of the place, and the mend shows, so you can see which hollows are old. At Grieth there is more mend in the lips than stone.
Nobody waters anything. The fog comes up, from below, as it does, and the hollows take it, and it goes down again, and the dorrel is taken the same turn and the pellun is kept and the thrisk goes over the lip to meet the next one. That is the whole of it. I kept hollows when I was small, with whoever was looking after me that year, and I thought everyone everywhere did, in the way you think things when you are small.
Here there is a garden a few streets from my rooms, on a corner, with a gate that is not locked in the day. The ground inside is divided into boxes, raised, each with a low fence round it that a child could step over and a number on a stake. I was glad of the hollows at once. They are the wrong shape and they are up on legs, but they are hollows, one thing to each, kept by one household each, and I stood at the gate for a while just being glad.
I asked what the fences kept out. I was told nothing, they were so you knew which was yours. At home you know which is yours because you are the one keeping it. I did not say that. I said I saw.
Then a man came with a hose and watered his. I had not seen it done before and I did not understand it for a moment, and then I did, and I had to look at something else. The water went in from the top. It fell on the ground from above, onto the leaves and onto the soil, out of the air, where water does not come from. At home that would be the fog falling, and the fog does not fall. I said, as politely as I could, that I had not known water could be put on from that side. He said it was the only side there was. I said yes. I stayed until it had gone down into the ground, which took about ten minutes, and then it looked like a hollow again and I could look at it.
I have thought about it since. I think they do it because the fog here does not come up. There is nothing to take. So they bring the water to the hollow themselves, from the only side they can, and I think that is a kind of keeping too, done the hard way round. I would not say so to him. He has number fourteen, and it is doing well.