Paul Fleischman's Seedfolks

"I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples." -Mother Teresa. This explains that the smallest shift can create infinite changes. In Paul Fleischman's novel Seedfolks, simple changes inspire incredible revolutions in several people, including Ana, Maricela, and Sae Young.
At the start of Seedfolks, Ana is a grumpy senior who thinks that all teenagers cause trouble. So when she sees a teenage girl burying something in an abandoned lot, she becomes quite suspicious. “After twenty years of typing for the parole department, I just about knew what she’d buried. Drugs most likely, or money, or a gun… I worked my way through that awful jungle of junk and finally came to her spot… I hacked there and dug, but didn’t find anything, except for a large, white bean. I tried a new spot and found another, then a third. Then the truth of it slapped me full in the face. Two beans had roots. I knew I’d done the harm… I laid those beans right back in the ground, as gently as sleeping babies. Then I patted the soil as smooth as could be.” When Ana was first introduced, she was very closed-minded, but as she dug up those beans, she realized that …show more content…
“This woman, Leona, who had a garden and talked to us, came over and handed me some flowers she’d grown. She knew I didn’t want to be pregnant. I could talk to her about it...bam! Then all the TV’s and radios went off. So did the lights. It was a power failure… ‘Whole city shuts down, but thye garden just keep going.’... My body was part of nature… it wasn’t some disgrace to be part of it. It was an honor… And just for that moment I stopped wishing my baby would die.” All it took was a realization about the connections that all beings share to change Maricela from a resentful teen to a happier to-be