Seedfolks

Nine-year-old Kim stands alone at dawn beside her father’s portrait on the family altar. She does not know her father because he died eight months before she was born. Kim wonders if her father’s spirit even knows who she is, but she has a plan to ensure that he will.

Kim takes a thermos, a spoon, and a jar of dried lima beans from the kitchen and walks out into the Cleveland streets, still cold though it is April. She crosses over to a lot and crouches behind a rusty refrigerator out of view of the street. She digs six holes and then plants and waters the beans. Kim’s father was a farmer in Vietnam. By planting a garden and ensuring that it thrives, she hopes that her father’s spirit will know her as his own.

The daughter of Romanian immigrants, Ana has lived in the neighborhood since 1919. It has always been a working-class neighborhood where groups come and go quickly—first Romanians, then Slovaks and Italians, and finally Black Americans from the South during the Great Depression. Ana once moved away to Cleveland Heights, but she returned to the neighborhood to care for her parents.