Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Maybe



Maybe you are a dreamer, but you get tired sometimes. You fight discouragement. And you dream, yes, and you Do, as well, but your hands feel so busy weaving together dream and reality…

And when they come to you, saying, We want to plant a garden! We want to grow vegetables! you remember when you had this dream of working the ground and pulling nourishment from the earth, plucking goodness from green stems. (They were going to help, but they did not. You were the Little Red Hen, out there alone planting, pulling weeds, and in the end watching your work, your beautiful plants, disappear bit by bit, eaten by deer and rabbits. You enjoyed your bounty alone, not that you didn’t try to share: 7 cherry tomatoes, 3 lemon cucumbers, 2 pumpkins. In the end you decided you had more important dreams to attend to.)

So they come to you with this dream and you remind them of yours and how it turned out. You give them your blessing but tell them they’re on their own for this one. You will focus on other dreams.

And they plant their garden, and not the way you would have done it.

And it grows.

Somehow this crazy, barely-planned, not-how-you-would-do-it garden does beautiful wild things, despite the rabbits. The plants bring forth jewels, and regularly you are called outside to admire their progress. Sometimes you go and check all on your own. You start to dream of all the things you can make with what they’ve grown, of all the goodness you can sit and eat together.

One day they bring in the largest zucchini you have ever seen and ask you to make zucchini bread. You would love to. You might even throw in chocolate chips.

They wait almost patiently when the bread is in the oven, even though it is late for breakfast. The kitchen on this cool summer day grows full and heavy with the scent of it, and you pull out heavy hot loaves, nutty brown flecked with green. It is good. You eat slowly.

It turns out you do not have to do all the dreaming.

Even so there is weaving to do, and now your hands feel rested.




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