So She Planted

By the second pot of water heated on the stove, the dishes were starting to pile up higher on the clean side than the dirty. Two pots of cheese, countless milk jars, and putting the healthier children to work alongside her and the counters were starting to show again. Surely the work was doing their systems good; the sunshine, chirping birds, and warm air too.

Perhaps it was that shining sun and those chirping birds that made her delirious that spring day, the fever being no longer. Or maybe it was simply spring fever, as the story goes.

Whatever the case, despite her fatigue, cough, and jars upon jars that still needed washing, all she could think of was the garden bed that still needed turning over and those seeds that weren’t going to plant themselves.

And she realized that she would always have that pull… so long as there was land and a shining sun and water in the ponds, she would always feel that she should be planting.

Where this pull came from was unclear. She was beginning to write blog posts in third person, after all, so one might argue that her mind was going anyway. But she never grew up with her hands in the dirt, never had her own patch of land until she was nearly 30, never grew up thinking she needed to get back to the land at all. Never a city girl but not exactly made of tough enough stuff for farming, yet here she was on five acres with six children, a milk cow, pigs, goats, and more chickens than you could shake a stick at.

She often wondered if it was sheer arrogance that got her here; thinking she could live like her great-grandparents while homeschooling six children and wresting food from this unforgiving land that had broken her more times than she could count. She wasn’t the strong resilient type; no, she wasn’t that kind of woman at all.

Still, she had land. And while there wasn’t always water enough, more often than not there was, and so with land and water she figured she best be planting. Especially considering the mouths to feed around the table, the full-time job that took Daddy from home nearly half a 24-hour day, and the fact that summer was just around the corner and that kind of heat made her feel rightfully small on these five acres. Broken and bruised, she had weathered seven of these unrelenting seasons; every one of them feeling harder than the last, every one of them making her weaker and weaker.

When does it kick in, she wondered, that “Y’all will acclimate to it,” so often spoken to her in that thick Texas drawl by so many well-meaning folks?

After seven years she knew the answer to that: Never.

Just as she would never stop growing and making (and mostly a mess, at that), she would always be just a girl from Minnesota who would gladly shovel snow at twenty-below but who withers when the mercury approaches 85. No, she knew she would never come to love it here as she had been told so many times. This place would always break her, she knew that much, but maybe that’s exactly what she needed.

And she knew that the Lord’s ways were higher than her ways so she could rest in that; in Him. How many times had the decisions she would never make in the flesh turn out to be the best things that happened to her? How many times had He lead and been faithful, even when she was not. Every time, she knew, every time.

So that afternoon, after the jars were washed and the counters found and the floor swept, she found a couple of seed packets and headed out the front door. The kitchen garden held a bed, just next to the lettuce and collard babies, that needed no preparation. She knew she didn’t have it in her to turn a bed over today, so just eight seeds went into the soil that day. The watering can was emptied, the mulch laid over. Her head began to pound again as she got up from kneeling.

Still, she had hope. The Lord could make anything grow, she knew, if it be His will. He is Creator of all and in infinite mercy had saved her broken and Hell-bound soul, after all, even when she was yet steeped in rebellion against Him. And though she was just a weak girl from Minnesota who withered in the heat, still she had land… and a handful of seeds… and water enough in what still felt like a foreign country. And what a mercy all of that truly is. Yes, her broken life was filled with that beautiful, loving, inexpressible mercy.

So she planted.