Leo

My grandmother kept a tin of dirt on the shelf, the way other people keep china. Prairie dirt, she called it. From the field behind her house, before the highway took the field.

When the city opened a garden on the empty lot, she took the last plot. For a month she planted nothing. Then one evening she worked the whole tin into the top inch of soil and went home.

The first year gave her thistles. “Weeds,” the neighbor said, and he was right. She watered them anyway.

The second spring, one flower came up that nobody had planted. Then a whole stand of them, blades and bells, the kind nobody had seen in this county since before the highway. The neighbor stood at the fence a long time. “That's prairie,” he said. “Where does a person even get prairie?”

She only smiled, the way she smiled when a question arrived fifty years too late.

I have the tin now. It is empty, and I tell people so, and they never believe me. What they really want to know is what she knew: some things come back late, and the late ones stay.