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border nobody has so far put a single seed in the ground. Even if it doesn’t rain another drop after today, it’ll be two weeks at least before anybody can, Iris thinks, the land’s so wet a tractor on it would sink out of sight. It’s a circumstance so unusual in this near-desert country that it’s beyond surprising, must be accepted as the end of the known world.
    She’s on her way to town to help at the annual strawberry tea whose purpose is to raise funds for the upkeep of the cemetery — some call it the Cemetery Tea, but Iris has always found that name distasteful when it’s possible to make so unavoidable an event sound happy and a celebration of spring. As she turns off her own farm access road and begins to fight the muddy grid road, the car splashing through the water-filled ruts, slewing sideways when she gives it too much gas, a weariness overtakes her. Her usual good spirits have leaked away bit by bit over the last two months, she’s tired out from the arguing, the waiting, the hoping, from the loneliness with Barney away.
    But at least it isn’t raining, for the moment anyway, and who knows, maybe it’s finally going to stop, this interminable downpour. The vast, soaring sky that normally fills most of her windshield is blocked off by heavy, round-bottomed, steel-grey clouds and she notes how the wet and the dull light intensify the delicately coloured landscape, giving it a rare, almost tropical richness of tone. She turns her head left for a glimpse of the deep, wild coulee that joins her land to that of her neighbours, the Normans, and for the blue river cliffs beyond andabove it, with their dashes of white clay shining in the light, but the view at that distance has vanished into thick grey drizzle.
    So she watches the near fields stretching out on each side of the deserted road: field after field of stubble left from last year’s harvest, or summerfallow beginning to acquire a greenish cover of weeds. She’s passing the only small pasture of native grass left on the road that leads from the farm she has lived on nearly all her life to Chinook, the town she’s driving to, and she can’t help but think, even though she’s a farmer’s daughter and a farmer’s wife, how pretty it looks, all blue-green, with tints of aqua and mauve. The pasture looks as if it’s drinking up the rain. Everything else looks in need of care, everything else is waiting for the rain to stop so life can go on.
    She thinks again of pointing out to Barney that they should be getting their equipment ready to do their spring seeding; she hasn’t so far because she’s afraid he’ll say he isn’t coming home to seed, that he’ll hire Vance Norman to do it. If he says that, she’ll know their life together really is over. And the new air seeder is beyond her, all computerized, with depth gauges and a bank of mysterious lights and numbers. And Barney fertilizes at the same time, which makes the whole thing even harder to learn. This new farming is too complicated.
    She remembers her father filling the drill box with bucket after bucket of pale gold seeds, she hears the rich
shshshsh
of the seeds as they pile up and spread out, smells its welcome, dusty scent. She would put her arms into the yellow seed and push it sideways, spreading it out evenly through the long box. They were cool against her palms, they flowed willingly at her touch, the precious cargo inside them protected, waiting for the right moment to spring to life. Nowadays, when Barney augers seed into the hopper of his air seeder, you can’t see it, and all you hear is that heartless, high-tech whine that she hates. She thinks how farm machinery used to clank and roar and growl in a satisfying way that sounded almost like a hard-working human.
    She has reached the lip of the valley where the straight-as-an-arrow road winds down its wall to the small town clustered around a bend in the narrow river, its grain elevators — dark wine, drab grey, bright