Our wedding came just two days after spring began, when the trees were still a tangle of bones against the butter-gold forsythia down by Papa's pond. So Jared and I came into the gardening season as stragglers. By the time we returned from our honeymoon, the daffodils were already blooming along our fence, and the … Continue reading The First Year
This piece was written for the February issue of our church newsletter, Grace & Peace. Each year, I get a little better at remembering to plant bulbs. I wait until the garden has fallen asleep and the late chrysanthemums have stopped blooming, those first few frosts biting at their heads and turning them gray. One … Continue reading Bear Fruit With Patience
We saved pickling for the hottest afternoons in July, letting the big round thermometer beneath Papa Jay’s sunroom swing well over 90, the humidity souping up like the moss on his pond. It was a big job, with loads of cucumbers to harvest between our garden and Papa’s. Over a few weeks, Mom would save … Continue reading Pickling Day
A month or so before we started dating, Jared offered to send me seeds in the mail. This surprised me, because I didn’t know many guys who planted gardens. I knew fewer who had an abundance of heirloom seeds on hand. When I thought about it, Jared was the only guy I’d ever talked to … Continue reading Seeds in the Mail
A few days ago, I dug my sourdough starter out from the back of the basement fridge, lifted off the tea towel, and found it was black and hard as stone. I said, Of course. This would be the year my starter died. My biologist friend had told me just last week that it’s quite … Continue reading The Year My Sourdough Starter (Nearly) Died
A True Story from Home April is young, and I’m in my garden as often as I can be. Today, I have company. My nephew, Bennett, is kneeling in the zucchini patch beside a Red Ryder wheelbarrow. He asked if he could help, so he’s weeding the clover that crept up in early March, tossing … Continue reading A Garden in Babylon
Before the sun slipped down on the Sabbath, Mary might have pressed aloe leaves and squeezed their gum into a dish, mixing it with myrrh and water. Carrying it to a buried Jesus at dawn must have felt like a last, little fragrant offering. But when she saw the sunrise streaming into an open tomb, … Continue reading Leaves of Healing
“I was putting off knowing it. All that day there had been a crashing in the wind, the sound of a chainsaw and that of a much heavier engine.” - Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow I watched one afternoon in October to see my neighbor’s chainsaw whir and whine and whistle clean through the trunk of … Continue reading Upon the Death of a Bradford Pear
In The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote of a woman named Mrs. Almira Todd, who lived in a clapboard house on the coast of Maine---a gardener and a landlady and "an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame." They grew out from her gray-shingled walls and up her steep gables, … Continue reading Scent on a Spring Breeze
A True Story from Home To me, Mrs. Olave Thurston was the lady in my grandpa’s stories---as if she was another Ma Ingalls or Miss Rumphius. When we ate chicken for dinner, Papa would tell how Mrs. Thurston raised, butchered, and boiled her own. When spring came and I cut fresh flowers for the table, … Continue reading Gravestone Flowers
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