I decided to write a story about a gardener. She was an old woman, blind, wrinkled, who looked like a witch and was dreaded by her neighbors. But she was not a witch, she reasoned with herself. She did, though, have hands that could hear things just as well as her ears. She knew that on a warm day, the dirt buzzed, and on a cold day, the dirt shivered, heaving tiny sighing sounds. A healthy root could sing a song, a dead root cracked at the first note and could never find the right pitch again. Buds and petals and new leaves all had their own ways of talking, screaming, laughing, or groaning. Once a day the villagers surrounded her shack and called out her name, asking her to leave because they did not want a witch among them. But what was so extraordinary about a blind person who could ...