Gardening
I didn’t grow up in anything close to a rural or agrarian area, yet I can recall having a fascination with gardening, farming, animal husbandry, and general homesteading from a young age. I don’t really know where it came from — Little House on the Prairie, maybe? But even that seems like a stretch. The idea, though, of a simple life, a tidy home, the daily rhythm of manual labor, and an acre or two of rolling pasture in the background has always appealed to me.
I don’t live that life — at least, as I like to optimistically say, not yet. But there is one aspect of it that has materialized only recently, in my independent adult life, and that is gardening.
Let me preface this by saying that I don’t actually have any clue what I am doing, and I rarely have successful results. Half the time our “lawn” (which we now refer to as a yard), actually looks like nobody lives there. Everything is overrun with weeds, because a) I’m a closet conspiracy theorist who refuses to spray herbicides where MY darling children play, b) I actually don’t mind the way dandelions look (yellow is my favorite color, and have you ever SEEN them when the sun sets behind their puffs???), and c) I’m a pushover even when it comes to plants.
But every year I still try to plant seeds.
My best year, of course, was before I had very small children, when I methodically placed each seed in the earth with well wishes and tender loving care. Nowadays, I haphazardly throw seeds on the dry ground sometime around May 31st and hope that they bloom before October.
Nonetheless, I love gardening. I love the feeling of soft soil beneath my hands, I love the smell of wet earth. I love going to sleep at night after a warm day spent planting things outside, listening to the crickets play their fiddles and knowing that there’s a little promise of something in the dirt outside my window.
I love walking out a few days later and spotting those first few sprouts, triumphantly jutting out of the ground. I love their bright green color against the dirt’s rich chocolate brown. I love watching them day by day as they grow and expand, leaf by leaf, until those first few blessed buds appear, springing with hope and expectation, buzzing with a patient energy.
I love especially the inherent act of surrender that comes with planting a seed; a surrender coated in hope. I love giving up control of the outcome, knowing I can’t fix the weather. I love the joy that that surrender brings, very much like the joy of the limits of any other artistic medium. I love discovering how each flower blooms one beside the other, I love seeing which color will bloom first, and I love that the arrangement is always better than I imagined it would be when left to the hand of God.
I loved planting seeds when I was expecting, nestling them deep into the earth and waiting, waiting, waiting. They were their own kind of womb, shrouded in secrecy, darkness, and hope until one day they bloomed and took shape.
I loved taking our daughter home to our house surrounded by all those flowers after watching them bloom all summer. They were a prayer, and so was she, at last before our eyes and springing to Heaven.
I love flowers as signs of beauty, joy, and hope. I love putting them on birthday cakes. I love cutting them for a bouquet to have on the table when someone comes for dinner. And I love receiving them in other people’s homes.
I love gazing at each blossom in the sun and sinking into the depth and nuance of their color, the complexity of each texture and shape.
I love them even when our yard is filled mostly with weeds.
When I was a little girl, enchanted by the idea of gardening, of turning over dirt in my hands and making it into something beautiful, if unpredictable, my grandfather, himself a master gardener, gave me a beginner’s handbook to gardening. I never really opened it, because it looked like boring nonfiction, and at the time I’d rather dream about working with my hands and only pretend to take care of animals. Yet I kept it all these years, and when I embarked on gardening a few years ago, I opened it with a new eagerness. On the front page was a note from my grandfather to me: “Dear Olivia, Enjoy your garden this year and every year to come. You will find peace and God in your garden. Love, Grandpa”. He was right.