One Job

You strip the phone down to its board and its battery. Graciela passes you her iron, handle first. You solder two copper probes onto the board and, beside them, a solar panel the size of a stamp. Then she loads a program. It is eleven lines long. It reads how wet the soil is between the probes, and once a day it sends one number to whoever tends the garden where it is buried.

She reads aloud while you work, from a page about Roman roads, the ones that still carry carts.

She seals board and battery in a freezer bag, taped tight around the wires of the probes and the panel. On a strip of tape she writes SOIL and, under it, ONE JOB, and presses it to the bag with her thumb.

Through the back window you can see the yard: raised beds along the fence, and in each bed a row of small panels, tipped up, dark.