A Tough Row to Hoe

I’ve been doing a lot of planting in my garden recently, and it’s been hard to keep some of the plants going. For one thing, the rabbits really like the marigolds and verbena and a few other things. They just eat them right down to the ground. Other plants, I think, find the soil to be very difficult. I have a hard time burying the plants deep enough because there’s so much rock – about four inches of gravel that is poured around the trailers, and it’s hard to get through that rock into some real soil. When I plant, I realize later that things are sticking up too high. The roots are exposed to the heat and will be dry no matter how much I water. In addition, when it heats up, you just can’t plant. No plant, no matter how hardy, can endure the heat and direct sun all day. For these reasons, I find that I have to work really hard. It occurred to me that this is essentially what love is. Love are those actions in which you feel encouraged to stay and keep trying instead of giving up and leaving, and we make such a virtue out of staying. I couldn’t care less. If we’re supposed to stay, we do, and if not, we leave. But that’s how God keeps us here. He causes love to continue to rain down on us, one way or the other. When we stop getting love, we really do start to die very quickly, and I can see it in the eyes of people I’ve been with who were coming close to death. I watched them go though these stages where, after a while, there just wasn’t enough love any longer to make you want to stay, when your body is that sick and in such pain, and your soul just longs to depart and get out of this pain and this boredom and go where you know the action is.

I look at these poor, struggling plants, and I can see them struggle, as if they’re on their last gasp, and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to encourage them enough to make them want to stay. If they leave, I don’t blame them. I see us as plants in God’s garden, and without the love we get from the people who are placed in our lives for a purpose, there’s just not enough reason to stay. This is a rather cold, bleak, and unpleasant world if you don’t have family and friends to nurture you. Now, I want it understood, I’m not complaining. I’m not feeling very much love these days coming through people, but I certainly feel it coming through my garden, my music. Even so, it’s getting harder for these things to hold me here. I just long to be gone. But I’m being given the grace for the time being to hang on, and one of the things I’m doing with my time is talking into this tape recorder, and maybe some of this is going to be used by the Almighty in bringing some small measure of comfort into your humdrum lives, as Lina Lamont said, in Singing in the Rain.