Planting the Garden

I need to write on my Blog because I haven’t visited it since March. I have been preparing a goodbye sermon to tell in my church the first Sunday of June. It took up all of the things I wanted to tell about. But last night I saw a new thing to tell. It was the sweet boy-man making his garden in the garden plot that I have worked for 30 years. As I watched out the kitchen window he was all curled down on his knees the way very little children squat, tapping out seeds, slowly, pausing now and then to look up. When he had emptied that packet he got up, grabbed his pitchfork and began tearing up the soil in a bed near by. He appeared to have completed that task quickly and moved on to a new area that required spreading loam. I had been preparing my dinner when I first looked out, so I returned to that task briefly before looking for him again. He was up on the tractor he’d driven through the woods to the edge of the garden. He’d obviously brought a load of loam or manure to spread on the garden and was in the process of dumping it. It seemed seconds later he was flipping soil in a new spot with his pitchfork. Dusk was beginning to move in. It was his intense busyness that caught me. This boy- man now owns my house. His parents bought it for him. When I leave in July, he will move in. He has displayed no impatience about my living here until then. It is an arrangement his parents and I have made. But when I suggested he might want to use the garden since I would not be planting it this year, his joy about owning his own home became apparent. It was as if every enthusiastic fling of dirt off his shovel was announcing his preparation for a harvest I know he will share with his neighbors. There was something so little boy about the way he went about the task and also what he was planting: a bunch of pansies, a little lettuce, some cat nips in one bed. Next to it was squash and pumpkins.
Letting go is a profoundly moving experience.