The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

Spring was coming, and it would soon be time to put the flower garden in.

Already, the ponies in Haywards Heath were preparing. Greenhouses were doing brisk business from dusk till dawn. Seed catalogs arrived in Milfoil’s mailbox, and they provided some diversion for Windflower, even though Milfoil had to flip through the pages for her.

As often as not, that would lead to corrections in the garden drawing.

I wasn’t much help in that department; I knew a few flowers and common vegetables and that was about it. Nevertheless, I’d sit in the kitchen with them, studying the catalog and watching as Windflower found a new plant she thought she might like and then considered where it might fit in the garden.

Surprisingly, she didn’t change things around as much as I thought she might. At her age, I would have been changing what I wanted on a daily—even hourly—basis. Windflower was more constrained. I wondered if that had something to do with their cutie marks, if they never wanted to wander too far afield from what their cutie mark said, or would say.

That was a thought that kept me up at night sometimes. I’d learned before coming to Equestria that a pony got one when she discovered what made her unique, and there had been endless theorizing about what that actually meant. There were times that I thought that cutie marks would be a disadvantage, that they would limit a pony to only doing one thing for her entire life.

But then I remembered that there were people on Earth who did that. Some people fell into a rut and didn’t have the courage or the skills or the desire or the opportunity to learn something completely different from what they’d done before. People in waning industries often clung on to what they knew as long as they could, even though the writing was clearly on the wall.

And it wasn’t like the ponies were automatons. That was something I’d quickly learned. They could do plenty of things unrelated to their cutie marks. Some ponies didn’t even have jobs that related to their mark, at least as far as I could tell.

Granted, a lot of my observations had been at arm’s length. I couldn’t say what the stallion in the general store who had a measuring cup for a cutie mark did in his free time. He knew the stock that the store had, he was friendly, and more than once he’d suggested a new product I’d never tried that I wound up liking. I couldn’t relate his cutie mark to customer service, and at best it was a fuzzy connection to inventory or retail in general. Maybe in his free time he measured things really accurately, sort of as a hobby.

My relationship with Milfoil had furthered the notion that a cutie mark didn’t prevent other skills. While it was true that Milfoil seemed a bit wistful, a bit depressed during the winter—something I would have expected, since she couldn’t grow plants in the winter—Windflower changed the equation. If she hadn’t been around, how might Milfoil have acted?

Then again, if she hadn’t been around, I never would have had the opportunity to meet Milfoil, and we probably would have stayed cordial neighbors and nothing more.

One day, this was going to be the strangest love story ever.

Just looking at catalogs and sketching out a garden plot was not adequate preparation for the looming spring.

I only really considered landscaping when the big box stores suddenly opened their garden centers, but of course there was all sorts of prep work that must have gone into stocking them. Managers deciding what would sell and what wouldn’t, then ordering it and scheduling deliveries at the right time. Developing plan-o-grams for the shelves and for the open pallets.

We had to think about that in advance, too.

I could have gone into a seed store or a greenhouse and showed them the drawing, and since I trusted ponies more than I trusted human salesman, I probably would have gotten what we needed, in the quantities we required. It would have taken forever, because I surely would have gone from one store to the next, not knowing who carried what.

Milfoil did. So I followed her lead, I stood by patiently as she discussed what was required with the shopkeepers. I helped her hitch up to her market wagon and unhitch when we got to stores, and I learned how to put her harness on and take it off again and I marveled that ponies could do this with hooves and mouth while I struggled with hands.

There were plenty of things to order, as well. Seeds and bulbs that weren’t stocked—I was used to just finding things in a catalog and making a phone call or even better, just clicking a few buttons on the computer and waiting for things to arrive at my door a few days later.

A couple of flowers we did order that way—although by mail instead of mouse clicks—while for the most part, Milfoil knew who to ask, who did business with which larger suppliers and could get a discount, or who piggybacked orders on top of each other to save money on shipping or qualify for bulk rates.

There were tools to buy, as well. I wasn’t much of a gardener, but I had an idea that by the end of the springtime, I was going to be.

We could have gone into dozens of stores and never found tools that were right for me. I imagined that minotaurs would have similar hand tools to humans, but there weren’t any minotaurs in Haywards Heath.

But there were plenty of craftsponies, and it turned out in Equestria, you could buy the iron parts of a tool by themselves and make your own handle.

Or, if you weren’t much of a craftsman, you could take it to a pony who was.

Thus, I found myself spending an afternoon in a wood shop, working with a couple of craftsponies named Snead and Helve. Both of them welcomed the challenge of making something new, and to my mind charged far too little for the finished products.

We had plenty of plants to work with. Literal wagonloads, wagons that I’d helped load and helped unload.

Milfoil had decided that we should keep as many as possible over at her house, and I didn’t question that decision.

She’d also decided that with so many plants, it was a good time for me to start really learning proper earth pony magic, before I did something dumb again.

On one hand, it was kind of a disappointment to have to go back to kindergarten after I’d experienced the full effect of pony magic. On the other hand, I’d nearly wound up killing myself with my utter lack of control, and that was something she wanted to avoid in the future.

Human kindergarten had been practicing forming letters. Cutting things out with safety scissors, learning to color inside the lines, and not eating the paste unless the teacher wasn’t looking.

Here, I got to fill little starter pots—which were arranged like oversized egg cartons—with soil, and then carefully put a single seed in each. Sometimes that was easy; they were big and I could grip them. Other times they were tiny, no bigger than a grain of sand.

Milfoil had mouth-held tools to help her with them, which she let me use.

Each time we’d fetch a new seed packet, she’d instruct me to hold it in my hands, in order to feel its unique song, and I did my best to hear and understand.

She taught me how to feel the soil for its content, whether it was wet or dry, how tough it was. When I’d started to master the basics, she started mixing things together and every day when we were finished with planting and fertilizing and watering, she’d give me what she called a challenge jar, containing a mix of two soils we’d worked with before.

Once I got decent at identifying a mix of two, she bumped it up to three and then four—and she didn’t tell me that she was doing it. I had to figure that out.

We also practiced sharing our magic. Even though I knew the risks, I wanted to push it, but Milfoil was more cautious, sometimes frustratingly so. As dumb as it sounded, I kept my focus by imagining movie montages, all the parts of the training that they left out of the finished movie because audiences would get bored. I was in the un-montaged version of the film, the extended edition where I rested my hand on her back or held her hoof as she worked with a seedling. And then I tried to replicate what she’d done, what I’d felt as she guided me.

The waters muddied; she was my mentor and my love, she was my boss and my partner, and sometimes it was hard for my human brain to completely sort the conflicts and it was easier to just cast off what I had been on Earth, what I had known. It was easier to just start over, to focus on the now, to become a child again, where the world was fresh and new and where possibility was still somewhat undefinable.

I’d never imagined that I’d celebrate the first showing of a sprout, but I did. Cynically, I knew that a plant did what it did, that eons of evolution had resulted in a seed that would sprout despite my clumsy skills and unfocused magic, but I celebrated just the same as the first little shoot emerged from the soil. It was nothing short of a miracle, and I wanted to parade it around town, to show the ponies that I, too, could make a plant grow.