A Day, In the Garden

Here I am, back before you know it, gushing about this dirt. Thank you all for your comments and emails on my last post.

Many mornings start with the letting out of the chickens and the checking of the gardens by Papa and whatever little helpers happen to make their way out in time.

Sometime after breakfast and chores I often wander out to check on things, harvest what needs harvesting, and water anything I might have the gumption for. It’s usually slow-going for us, as is the case with many activities involving anxious little helpers.

But it is a sweet, sweet time of work, questions, answers, and discussions that would probably never happen otherwise.

If we’re being honest, and I hope that we are, Stewart does most of the work behind these rows. I plant fun little plots of carrots and beets and potatoes and three sisters and herbs and greens. But the big, long, massively planted areas are all his handy work.

All while wielding that shovel or rake and carrying bags of compost and topsoil on those shoulders of his. He, of course, gets a hand or six from eager little men and ladies. This slows things down but makes those rows all the richer in sweet potatoes and lessons and stories.

If the afternoons are cool and he’s up for it, he might head out to plant some trees, add some fencing, or work on whatever needs fixing. And there is always something that needs fixing.

And then after supper it is usually Abram who requests a garden walk. We all head out, however many we can gather, and move from the chicken field to the fruit trees to the food forest and back to the pallet garden. We look, we taste, we talk about what worked and what didn’t, and sometimes we water or plant.

At least that’s how our days usually go.

Right now we are away. There is no garden, no dirt, no seeds, no gates to tend or pass through several times per day. It is only in this absence that I realize how this soil, this process of propagation and physical and spiritual conversion, is a part of our days… our life, really.

It often starts and ends and fills the day. It teaches our children the things we could never put into words for them, the things that can only be had by doing and digging and toiling.

And while it is only here and there that I dig in, mix, and mend, I miss it. I miss all of it – every last hard clump and shovel full of clay and patch of ground that needs a serious dose of manure. Every heart-changing, dirty fingernail-washing, deep breath-taking moment in this dirt…

I miss it.