Seedlings

Yesterday some of our family and friends brought over their dogs and we put them in the backyard to romp.  They had a great time running after their toys and chasing each other through the rhododendrons.  So we left them out there, only to be horrified a short while later. Where my vegetable garden used to be were now craters that aliens could spot from Mars. Wilted seedlings lay on the grass.  The dogs had dirty noses, filthy paws, happy doggy grins as they stood in the middle of my destroyed vegetable garden. 

Which reminded me of a time a while back we took in a foster child.  Not that she dug up my vegetable garden, but the outcome was similar.  Who could be a foster child without a suitcase full of issues?  There were a lot of them, and we diligently worked with a therapist and teachers to help this girl.  The issues were too great however, and they determined our home was not the best place for her and she moved on.  It left some battle scars upon our family.

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a sonnet I had to go look up both then and now.  It’s about a farmer that has lost his entire crop to a flood:

“The broken dike, the levee washed away,

The good fields flooded and the cattle drowned,

Estranged and treacherous all the faithful ground,

And nothing left but floating disarray

Of tree and home uprooted,--was this the day

Man dropped upon his shadow without a sound

And died, having laboured well and having found

His burden heavier than a quilt of clay?

No, no. I saw him when the sun had set

In water, leaning on his single oar

Above his garden faintly glimmering yet…

There bulked the plough, here washed the updrifted weeds…

And scull across his roof and make for shore,

With twisted face and a pocket full of seeds.”

Hope.  What gardener doesn’t plant with that great commodity?  Who doesn’t love children without seeing what they might become?

So I’m sitting in my chair by the window with the book of poetry in my lap, gazing out at my garden. I think a lot about that little foster child and hope no matter where she is today that she is growing and blossoming wherever she is replanted.  God bless her now and forever.

I put the book away and slip on my boots.  I’ve got packets of seeds I need to go re-plant.