He laid the socks into the basket, the cotton thinned by years of walking row to row. When he lifted his eyes to her, they held each other’s gaze and understood without speaking: by her care, there was still a margin of mercy.
They might yet endure.
She turned the socks over, feeling the memory of their days in the heels and toes. How much longer could they be mended forward? She had already opened them and grafted cotton to the crowns, so many borrowed pieces joined together that no pair could remember its beginning.
In the darning she read a calendar—each stitch a season spent, each knot a vow kept. She had mended before, and now she mended again, needle moving like a small compass, finding, holding, tug, touch.
As she worked, she whispered petitions into the socks: for the seed and its patience beneath the soil, for the man whose hands learned the weather before the sky did, and for the turning year. Time passed through them both—his strength given to the land, her care drawn tight across thinning cloth—an exchange repeated from faith. From sun to soil, from hand to hand, life kept its circle, and gratitude rose, steady as their gaze.
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