In The Winter

In The Winter

The sky is slate gray and the wind is moving across the land like a freight train flying through the night.  My vegetable garden, bereft of its summer color and life giving intensity, is quiet now, sleeping beneath a blanket of snow. In some ways I am asleep too.  My body moves a bit slower against the cold, my bones know all to well that the sun has gone away and my extremities remind me that it takes extra time for my blood to reach its appointed destination.

The only bit of me that is fully awake is my mind as it surveys the scene. It surely understands the necessity of the season, it knows full well that desolation leads to renewal, that hopelessness is the springboard of hope, that loneliness can be the harbinger of friendship and that silence can sometimes be the mother of laughter.  However, knowing these things does not always sooth the soul.

And so I begin to silently recount all of the steps I have taken to care for my garden.  All during the warm weather, compost has been created and applied in generous form.  The clay that originally laid here has been softened to loam with the addition of sand and constant tilling, lime too has been applied.  Straw has been mixed in to further break down the clay.  Many cows have added their droppings to increase the nitrogen content and iron and other nutrients have been laid down in proper quantity.  I wonder if the bacteria I am trying to promote are slowed by cold.  Perhaps so, but I imagine that they are doing their bit as well as they are able.  These thoughts make me happy in counterpoint to the visual effect of the scene, which pulses with isolation and loneliness.

And then I begin to wonder is this my garden or do I belong to it?  After all it provides a good portion of my dietary requirements.  Yes, I feed it generously, but it is from its bounty that I draw my life force.  I labor at it with good intent, yet it did not choose to be a vegetable garden.  It would have been content just being a patch of grass.  It is a symbiosis, but since I did choose to create its identity, I must conclude in the end that it is my garden and being so I am the one responsible for its well being...Even in the coldest of times.

As it is with my garden so it is with my being.  It is mine, given to me by forces that I will never fully comprehend.  A gardener of vast skills must have chosen my identity.  But I have no knowledge of my own beginnings.  All I have are echoes of the creation that come to me as a small voice speaking volumes.  And the greatest of these missives that comes to me over and over is a reminder that I am responsible for maintaining that which has been given to me.  For better or worse I am the gardener now.

Just as I come to this conclusion, I am shaken from my musings by the arrival of a tiny sparrow.  He alights on my garden and manages to find a vestige of the long gone plants.  He quickly pulls the thin vine from the snow, secures it in his beak, gives me a good stare, and flys straight up into the gray sky.  Up he goes, a little black dot on a gray background and ever so lightly lands on top of the tallest oak.

As I stare up it occurs to me that perhaps that single shred of grass, so highly valued by my sparrow friend, may in fact be more than it appears.  Perhaps it is the string that the gardener of vast skills employs to bind the sack in which he gathers up all of his creatures for safekeeping.  After all if the sparrow has his eye on me and I have my eye on the sparrow “is it not possible that the gardener has his eye on us all”?  I would like to believe so.