Is it magic?

This feels like magic. The ground is freshly turned, weeds pulled, clumps pulverized. I drag a shallow trough in the soil, then another one parallel, but twelve inches away. Like the package tells me to do.

I open the bag and stare down at the seeds. Miniscule, like something I would see in a spice jar. Scattered over a salad or sprinkled into a soup. These little specs will stretch into carrots?

The package tells me these coloured carrots were grown and eaten in Europe and Asia 1,000 years ago. Red, purple, white and yellow. The drawing on the front looks like a mistake, the creative colouring of a child who thinks orange is too ordinary for a carrot.

I carefully pour the seeds into the troughs, wondering if I'm doing it right. There's too many, it seems to me. The package tells me I should space the seeds one inch apart, but I'm lazy. I'll thin them out later, I decide.

The package is my teacher. It tells me what to expect from these tiny seeds and how to ensure that they reach their full potential. Someone has discovered when they are expected to emerge and when their growth will have reached its climax. So I blindly trust the package.

As I fill in the troughs with soil, shutting the seeds off from the sun, I feel like I am participating in a great show of magic. Tiny seeds hidden in the soil will have, in "65-75 days", transformed themselves into crunchy, colourful carrots.

If it wasn't written on the package, my supernatural gift of skepticism would scoff at the idea. But I have decided to trust the writer, trust the inherent promise. And see if it's true. It's not attempted magic after all, I decide, but an act of faith.

Faith that I'm not wasting my time. That something will come of this careful staging of anticipated growth. Faith that what I'm doing will someday bear tangible results.

I stand up and stare down at the ground. Nothing but dirt lies before me. A narrow strip of bare soil. An empty package gripped by earthy fingers is the only sign that anything out of the ordinary has just occurred in that patch of garden.