Today I planted a little garden: Two tomato plants, two butternut squash, a spaghetti squash and three cucumber plants. While I am not a gardener, I do know zucchini secretly wants to take over the world, so I didn’t plant any.
My husband was a fabulous gardener. Like the Little Red Hen, he would plant, nurture and harvest, and I would eat. It was a great arrangement! Last spring, he had only been gone a few months and I just didn’t have it in me to plant a garden. It took all the emotional energy I could muster to rip out the old tomato plants from the fall-the ones he so carefully grew and he died before they did. I put his large, handmade cages in corner of the yard, thinking I would never use them. My grief kept me from even thinking about working the ground.
Winter, spring, summer, fall, winter, and spring passed, and now early summer has arrived. I finally felt I could I could plant. My neighbors helped me till a little space and prepare it for plants. I mixed an old bag of manure I had in my yard into the dirt (that was a mucky, odoriferous adventure), planted the vegetables and carefully placed the tomato cages my husband made over the plants. I gave them some Miracle Gro and a pep talk and we are off and growing!
As I dug around in the dirt, I thought how there is no hurry to do things as we grieve. We don’t have to do everything at once, we can pace ourselves. We can postpone. We can never do whatever it is we are postponing. It’s okay. Just as I could not face planting a garden last year, I told myself I would think about it in 2014. When 2014 arrived, I found I was emotionally ready to plant.
There are still things in my life I am not ready to do. Who knows if I will ever be ready to do some of them. What I do know is I am not worried about it and just as with plants, to every thing there is a season.
