A tree kept indoors, in a little clay pot, for no reason I can find.
It bears no fruit. It gives no nut, no berry, nothing a child could eat in a hungry month. It is not oak for the fire nor willow for the basket. My mistress waters it from a small vessel as though it were a sick lamb, and speaks to it, soft, the way my wife once spoke to the babe we lost. But this thing does no work. It does not shade the beasts. It does not feed the pig. It only stands in the window and drinks the good light that ought to fall on bread.
In my village a plant earns its place or it is torn up and the ground put to better use. Here they have given a whole corner of a warm dry room, a room with no smoke and no beasts, to a weed in a bowl. And they are proud of it. My mistress turns it toward the sun so it grows even and pleasing to look on.
Lord forgive me, I think I understand. It is a thing they keep only so they might tend something and have it live. To pour water and see green answer, and no famine come of it.
They have grown so far from the fields that they must buy back a little piece of the ground to miss it.