Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Zag

zag
verb, intransitive. To make a sharp change of direction. Also noun. Origin: shortening of zigzag.

She knelt on the ground beside the bed. The pole bean seeds she had planted only four days ago had not only sprouted, they already had true leaves. She smiled. She was glad she had decided to try that variety: Kentucky Wonder. The first time she had planted them had been a revelation, and she had stuck with them ever since. They had climbed, flowered, borne beans and climbed some more. She had picked, eaten, frozen, and canned right up until a hard frost killed the vines, through the droughty, rainless summer and into autumn. Rarely had a cultivar impressed her so much. Now she unwould a length of jute twine from the spool and lashed it around the post at one corner of the bed. She stretched it to the post at the far corner and attached it there. She stood and knotted the free end of the twine to the horizontal she had just strung. She began to wrap twine up and down between it and the cord that ran between the posts at head height, guiding it so it zagged a few inches to the right every time it wrapped a cord. It didn’t take long before a loose trellis was suspended above the little plants. She knew she would have to help them find it, but once they did they would mount it with astonishing vigor. She grimaced at the uneven spacing and at the already-stretched horizontal cords that were closer together in the middle than they were at the ends. It wasn’t perfect, but it was cheap and it used materials she already had lying around. It would do.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.

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