Adam’s Task

Feeling now that there was something behind him, Adam sensed that certainly there must be something ahead, and so for the first time, he considered the future. It must have been frightening, for as he examined his small lot in life, he saw nothing but bleakness.

Feeling fear for the first time and not liking the feeling, Adam thought to overcome it with the remnants of gaiety that lay in his hand. He took little bits of the little bit left and started to experiment. He pulled a thorn from a stem and stuck it in his thumb, waiting for it to grow. He dropped a blade of grass in a muddy puddle and waited for it to sprout. He chewed up a leaf and shaped it into a petal, and then he placed the petal under a stone, hoping it would spontaneously transform into a flower (he had seen a toad under a rock earlier). He threaded stems through other stems; he squeezed oil from leaves, he sniffed the center of small blossoms and sneezed . . . finally, he threw the paltry memento mori of Eden into the wind and cried in despair.

Not long after this, Adam awoke to something he had not seen since the lost few days of Eden: a green morning. He didn’t know how it had come to be but sensed it was from his efforts, and satisfaction, different than the kind he felt when lying with Eve, entered him. Eager to keep this green pleasure, he went back to experimenting. He moistened some green with spit, other with urine, more with water; he burned some, smashed some, tore some up and scattered them, touched one green to another green, and he watched and waited. So he came to be observant. And patient.

Some green browned and wilted, but others flourished, and in those flourishings of green were a few splashes of color; when he would lie down and put his cheek on the earth so that the blooms of color looked tall, he felt he was in Eden again. There was a difference, though, for he had made this garden rather than God, and for the first time he felt pride.

Adam decided that to keep this pride, he would have to keep track of what he had done to the patches of green and splashes of color. And to keep track demanded that he name things. Whatever things felt to him, by touch and smell and taste and sight, he called them, putting sounds together in fanciful, silly, and beautiful ways: Rose. Nasturtium. Foxglove. Impatiens (he was eager for that one and not a very good speller yet), delphinium, bluet (he thought he’d blown that one, but it survived). Bachelor button (they made him think of his days of easy singularity in Eden). Zinnia. Daisy. Coreoposis. Morning glory (he was so happy when in the dew he spied it climbing his apple tree) …

After much work, Adam looked around his plot and saw that it was good. And he was surprised at how it resembled a place he had once taken for granted. Having a head full of notions — of love and need and loss and discrimination and choice and taste and patience and observation and pride and beauty — he picked his first bouquet and gave it to his Eve.