The Find

We were moving to a two-bedroom house with one-and-a-half acres in the country which I had inherited from my grandmother. Besides being excited for the change, it brought back memories of Grandma Elsie. I remembered her taking care of me while my mother was working when I was young. She told me forbidden stories from times past, stories which had now been erased. 

My mom hadn’t made her take the mandated prescription which would have disabled her from remembering them, because she needed grandma to babysit me and my younger brother, which required her faculties to be in good working order. Mom simply cautioned us, “Just overlook it if your grandma rambles on with tales from the past. She doesn’t mean anything by it. She just doesn’t know any better. And don’t tell anyone at school, okay? We want to keep her around as long as possible, don’t we?” And I really did. Grammy was nothing but gentle, loving and sweet to me, and I wanted as much of her as I could get.

Although my grandma hadn’t lived in her house in a long time, she had retained ownership of it, which passed to me. I had continued renting it out, as she always had, to bolster our finances during what must have been (and still is) one of the worst recessions in history. When the tenants moved out and no more applied, it left us unable to make ends meet in the city. But we could make a go of it in the country, where we would only pay taxes and utilities because we owned the home. Hopefully, there was work close to home or close enough to commute. 

At any rate, we could grow fresh food and buy a couple of chickens locally. At least we wouldn’t starve. So the first thing I did after moving, once the dust had settled, was to “buy” five hens and a rooster. They cost us a third of our ration stamps (ration stamps, as you know, are more valuable than income these days), but I thought it was worth it, because ration stamps do not continually produce food and chickens do. 

My husband, Sanjit, approved of my decisions in all these matters. I had chosen him from among the pre-approved matches in my state-sanctioned dating app and he had responded positively to me. We both had similar goals and fit each other’s Consolidated Nations zero-emissions profiles (meaning we had agreed to not have children for a minimum of fifteen years after marriage), which resulted in many benefits, including more ration stamps as part of the “Net-Zero Incentives Plan”. 

The CN had temporarily assumed control of each person’s online dating bank as part of a four-pronged strategy to defeat religion. This was necessary, because, as a result of extreme religious hostilities, thermonuclear weapons had been deployed, killing millions when certain countries had attacked and counter-attacked each other. Those countries severely crippled themselves and each other, but the weapons they had used affected the whole Earth, not just them. If those kinds of religious hostilities were allowed to continue and fester in the surviving nations, the CN feared deployment of more thermonuclear weapons, issuing in a Nuclear Ice Age that would lead to global crop failure as the best and nicest result.

The Consolidated Nations had succeeded in convincing its remaining member states to amalgamate their military forces into to one global coalition, united by common laws and goals, for the preservation of humanity. A special task force for each country was quickly assembled to dismantle all remaining nuclear weapons using an approved fourteen-step process, confirming removal of nuclearly energetic arms from their delivery systems and placement into sealed storage containers. 

Moreover, to prevent the destruction of the whole planet and all of us hereon, I had to marry someone whose grandparents had a different faith-culture than mine, in addition to the oaths against religion one must take. By assimilating all cultures into one, the aggressions were melting into one big melting pot. Religious materials were outlawed, and everyone was required to renounce religion. For the most part, we were only too glad to do it.

There were a few radical extremists who refused to renounce religion, though, who were gently euthanized (everyone who attended a euthanasia said it seemed the euthanizees were just going into a pleasant sleep), becoming martyrs of their respective faiths. But why would someone die for a belief system, if they had a choice? My grandmother’s grandmother had been killed for her ethnicity, but she didn’t choose that and wasn’t offered any choice where she could pick something else and live. 

Thus, life found me here, married to Sanjit (nickname: Sanji), dwelling on my grandmother’s old farm. Our first discovery was an ancient fig tree that had survived everything (I supposed the tenants had taken good care of it); we were comforted eating of its wonderful, sweet figs.

I made up my mind then and there that, in addition to chickens, vegetables, and herbs, I was going to acquire some fruit trees as well. So, the next day, after seeing that Sanji was fed and gone looking for work, and after feeding my newly acquired chickens, I set off to find a nursery. It wasn’t hard — some locals at the grocery store in town were kind enough to direct me to a nearby nursery. 

Always afraid of spending any money (everything was too expensive and money too dear), but knowing we had to eat, I felt investing in a continual source of food was the wisest course. Therefore, I bought two trees, a peach tree and a nectarine tree, as well as some cheap seeds that would sprout into corn, spinach, potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, mint, rosemary, and lemon balm. 

The peach tree already had a few peaches on it; it was all I could do to make it to the car before plunging my teeth into the sweet, juicy (if a bit crunchy because not-quite-ripe) fruit. My darling Sanjit need never know about this. I loved him but easily justified satisfying my peach lust by remembering his preachy little lectures on self-restraint and thinking of eating all the peaches we could hold once the tree bore more fruit.

Then I put my sticky little hands on the steering wheel and drove home with my trees. I had researched planting them online and found both types would be fine in the red clay soil of my farm but bought a large bag of premium soil to place around their roots, because the nursery had offered it dirt-cheap if you bought a tree.

I arrived home and, after a pit stop in the house, made my way to the carport, the half of which had been swiftly converted into an improvised chicken house by Sanjit (who turned out to be resourceful and clever in repurposing what would have otherwise been trash and a half-destroyed fence into a pretty decent chicken coop), the other half of which contained gardening tools that had been on the farm since the dawn of time.

After loading the trees, the dirt and a shovel into my wheelbarrow (the old wheelbarrow was substantial, though heavy and awkward), I conveyed everything into the backyard, deciding the trees should be planted halfway between the house and the furthermost boundary of the property for no reason whatsoever. 

I grabbed the shovel and began trying to dig a hole—it was very hard; the clay soil didn’t yield. So, using my weight plus my energy, I foot-forced it into the ground, thrusting and wiggling it into the earth with the strength of my leg muscles. I made a decent-sized hole, added a layer of premium soil, placed the nectarine tree on top of it, then filled in premium soil all around it, packing the edges with the soil I had dug out. I was happy for about ten seconds before realizing that I needed to go back to the house for water. I took everything out of the wheelbarrow and set it on the ground.

Then I made my way to the house and grabbed the first container I saw that I could put water in, a large watertight plastic storage container with a lid that I had used in moving. It was heavy and gawky but held thirty gallons of water. I filled it, using a hose, after placing it in the wheelbarrow and put my empty watering can next to it. It would have been so much easier had rain been imminent, but the sky was a cloudless blue and no rain forecast, so I fastened the lid on the storage container and headed back out to my trees.

I watered the first tree thoroughly, dipping my watering can into the container, then loaded everything into the wheelbarrow and headed to the opposite side of the field. Once there, I grabbed my shovel and prepared to fight the soil again, but it seemed easier than before, probably because I had a better idea of what it took to work it.

At least it seemed easier until I thrust the shovel in the third time—then it felt like I hit a rock. I tried to wriggle my shovel around it but couldn’t. I hadn’t counted on that. It was frustrating. Since the planting hole needed to be about three feet wide (though not as deep), I started digging a foot away from my initial attempt with an eye toward excavating the rock, if it wasn’t too big. I could have gone back for a trowel, but just didn’t want to go back to the house again.

As I dug into the ground, I dug right next to what I had taken for a rock. Then I saw that what had been obstructing me was not a rock at all. I saw the side of what looked like some containers my grammy used to have, heavy plastic with locking clamps that secured the top, not like the thin, raw-material-composed sustainable plastic of today. My excitement made loosening the remaining soil around it no chore—I quickly finished digging away the dirt that concealed my new prize and dislodged it from its position within my planting hole.

Unfortunately, I had busted the plastic lid with my shovel, and it was cracked. I wished I hadn’t done that. I lifted the box and began examining the clear sides, wiping the dirt away with tissues from the soft tissue packet in my pocket. I needed to make sure that it wasn’t a burial box for a pet. 

Something was wrapped in plastic inside the box. But it wasn’t a carcass: it looked like a cookbook or one of the planners my mother used to have. My heart started quickening its pace; I felt excited—as anyone would—at finding a mysterious buried book. Although I’m not given to self-control, I decided to preserve the mystery of my find long enough to get inside my cool house with it, where, after washing up, I could savor it with a glass of cold iced tea. 

Motivated by this goal, I was able to get the peach tree planted with super-heroine speed and bustle through everything I needed to do in order to get situated inside on my couch, showered and changed, with a glass of iced tea and my unwrapped book. (I had left the plastic on it after dusting off the minuscule debris that had found its way through the plastic I had cracked with my shovel.) Even lunch would have to wait while I found out what I had. 

I fully unwrapped my book over the tiny living room bin, discarding the plastic bag. The smooth, glossy cover of the book I had unleashed had an overall tint of barely-there shell pink, which overlay a calm beach with no waves, only a pastel-blue-colored tide caressing it, above which were hints of robin-egg-blue sky and white clouds. There were splashes of metallic gold in the lower right-hand corner which trailed upward towards the right edge, as if someone had shaken a paint brush over it or dotted it with different-sized tiny paintbrushes, with twin splashes in the upper left-hand corner.

In the center of the cover, were three words written in metallic gold cursive handwriting (script no one uses anymore, but which sang a song of ancient stories to me like a muse). The words were: Rest Your Soul. 

The pages were bound together not by a spiral, but by individual golden discs with heart-shaped holes in the center of each of them, for a spine. The pages and even the cover could easily be removed and replaced at will, because the binding didn’t pierce the pages, but, rather, the pages and cover were connected to the discs by grooves that fit the lips on both sides of the discs like puzzle pieces that could easily be removed and replaced.

I didn’t pay close attention to the “this book belongs to” page past glancing to see whether Grammy’s name was there, which it wasn’t. Flipping through the book, I noticed colorful hand-drawn pictures superimposed on each page of the planner except for the monthly overviews, which were, for the most part, completely covered by writing (yay!).

The pictures were the same and were in either the upper left corner of the left-hand pages, or, sometimes, lower down, on kind of a light grid on the left side of the pages, and, invariably, on the upper right corner of the right-hand pages. The background of the pictures was made by a yellow highlighter, which must have been used to shade in the background before the pen-and-ink drawings were done. There was a face without form that was nearest the page’s edge, which had heart-shaped eyes with pupils that were looking directly at another figure and a broad smile, usually open-mouthed, but sometimes with just a “happy face” smile. There were pen-drawn rays coming from the face and also hearts which were sometimes all around it, sometimes only on the side the other figure was on. The hearts had been colored in with red, a bright gel-pen red.

The other figure was a half-inch up to an inch away (depending on how much space the artist had) and had hearts on both sides of it as well as a red heart drawn just under her left shoulder, which was where the drawings invariably stopped.

This figure at whom the “sun” figure lovingly gazed was a girl, whose smile always matched the one drawn on the “sun”. If the figure with rays had an open-mouthed smile, so did she. If it had a close-mouthed smile, so did she. Sometimes her pupils were looking at the “sun” figure, but not always. Sometimes they were looking straight ahead. But the figure with rays was always watching her.

She had beautifully penned eyes, with long, feminine eyelashes, a nose and eyebrows. She had abundant, curly hair that swirled over her shoulders as well as descending from either side of her queen’s crown that she wore. On one drawing, hearts from the other figure appeared in between the points of her crown, hovering just above where they could have fit like puzzle pieces.

The sketches brought back memories of stories my grandma had told me of a Queen Esther. I looked at the sketches and thought about how much God must have loved Esther, without considering I was crossing a line that I had made an oath not to cross.

I turned to the first page that had a sketch of God loving Esther at the top of it, which was superimposed over January. Each day was separated into a long section that dropped down from the day of the month to the bottom of the page, and there were three days to a page. For example, the first day had a “1” above “Monday” and below it Monday’s column. The three columns of the three days were separated by vertical lines but there were three sections within each day’s allotted column. Monday had its three, Tuesday its three, and Wednesday its three. The first section (the header of which overspread all three columns of all three days) was titled “scripture reading plan keywords” and had three bullet points in its column with a shaded shell-pink area above the bullet points. The second section said “observation”, with each day having its own long-lined column; the third was headed by the word “application”, each day having its own long-lined column under “application” as well.

Monday’s bullet points were written in cursive below the name “Luke” and some numbers separated by a colon. They were (1) Good Tidings (2) Great Joy and (3) To All People. I felt so happy reading those words. 

I began to have a funny feeling, though, and thought I had better hide my book in the attic. Since the pages could easily be removed and replaced, I could sneak a few pages out every day or two and hide them in a notebook or some secret place no one ever looked. I carefully removed the “Good Tidings” page along with its neighbor and lay them on the couch, fished the plastic bag out of the bin, and, after re-inserting my new treasure into its bag and sealing it, made my way up the attic’s ancient, dusty wooden drop-down ladder just far enough to lay my new find on the floor before quickly descending, folding the ladder back and closing the attic door.

Then, returning to the couch, I placed the “Good Tidings” page on top of the other page I had removed and gently rolled them up, taking them to the closet and slipping them into a fancy dress purse I never used anymore, but still kept because it was posh.

There were some things I just couldn’t tell my Consolidated Nations-approved husband, and this was one of them.