text: (polite criticism welcome) We didn't replant the lettuce today. We didn't plant more carrots last week. We didn't plant anything new at all in the last two weeks. I'm scared. Since I arrived here, the one constant has been the daily planting of new seeds and saplings. Today was another beautiful day, one I should have spent harvesting from the garden and helping to replant the seeds as directed. It was a lot of work, done every single day, but I didn't mind. From the day I stumbled into the valley, I'd eaten well, directed by the silent Lady of the house, helped by the other children who haunted the house and out buildings. We were a scrawny lot, but even the quietest of us was slowly filling out. Me, I still remembered the hunger of being an outcast, fleeing from the edges of a war I never understood, that took all the adults from my life. The day I found this valley was almost magical in my memory. One minute I'm scrambling between two rocks, chasing a particularly plump looking lizard, the next, I'm tumbling down a hillside, landing in front of a woman in a dark dress, black hair pulled back severely, holding a basket of freshly harvested food. She took her time looking me over - her deep brown eyes meeting mine and holding them for a time, before she pulled a cluster of grapes still glistening from the morning dew from her basket and gave them to me. Without a single word being exchanged, I knew I'd found a shelter. Four years I'd been here now, and the routine was almost ingrained deep enough for me to do what I need do in my sleep. Wake up, wash up, go get a hot breakfast and then head out to the gardens. Every day the group of us would find our baskets, our tools and twists of paper holding seeds set out on the edge of the porch. Every day we would plant what would always turn out to be the exact right amount of seeds to feed us when they harvested. Sometimes we would hoe a new row and plant seeds there too, and always, when it was ready to harvest, there would be a mouth to eat the food. Until today. This spring, we had hoed extra rows for day after day, planting seeds until there were little left in the boxes that lived on the porch. Every day, more things planted, each that took less time to grow than the ones planted the day before. Every day harvesting, cleaning, eating, quietly existing in this oasis of calm, where children scarred mentally and physically from a distant war slowly healed with the good air and good food. Nothing was ever said about how the Lady knew what to plant, and when, but we trusted that the food would continue to last. For four years, it had never failed us - even in winter when we used the small green house. Today I harvested the last of the perfect lettuce I'd helped set into the ground. Today I helped harvest the last of the oats we struggled to get in the ground in early spring. We'd never planted this many before. We'd never planted as many of anything as we had this spring. I'd been slowly growing more afraid with each extra row we planted, looking over my shoulder sometimes at the two rocks that marked my entrance into the valley, as though to see whom might spring forth from their shadow. Today, we harvested everything, and nothing remains growing in our fields. Nothing remains growing in the green houses. The porch and the ground in front is covered with piles of food and we stand beside our Lady, watching her calm face, her two hands grasping each other, glancing at each other as the shadows beneath the rocks grow in size.