Request #404 From Evan

I’ve been trying to find this one for a long time! I read it in the late 80s or early 90s but it was probably old by then. It might have been a short story in an anthology. The only thing I really remember is a woman with a lot of children and an absent husband. There’s a lot of tension around a secret she’s keeping, which has something to do with the husband having been missing longer than the youngest child has been alive. There’s a big reveal at the end when she goes into the back yard and there’s a baby being born from a plant – a seed pod, I think, that opened up. That’s all I really remember: the sense of revelation and wonder at the baby growing from a plant, and their fear of being discovered. Someone in another group said he remembered it and the words “Rowan oak” – which rang a bell for me as well. If I had to guess, I’d say it might have been written in the 1970s or early 80s – it would have fit in well and I had a lot of library discards to read. I’d love to solve this mystery!