牙 — A Tooth of Grass

Folio 1/2

芽, sprout: the grass radical laid over 牙, tooth. A shoot is grass biting upward through soil — a fossil of someone, three thousand years ago, kneeling close enough to notice that emergence looks like appetite.

Folio 2/2

Latin reaches the same result from the other side: germinare shares blood with germanus, of the same parents. Both were describing inheritance and calling it spring.