Repent, Recant, and Regard Afresh the Gift

"To be a greedy gardener seems somehow offensive.  What I get from the garden I like to regard as a gift.  Nature and I have cooperated.  Though when we have summers of drought, then summers when it rains daily for six weeks and the garden is a swamp, I feel angry, cheated.  Who's cooperating here?  This is my garden!  Not my chief source of food, it's true, but the food I most covet and hoard in the deep freeze for the worst of winter nights, an essential ingredient of the life we've made for ourselves here."
-----Deborah Tall, From Where We Stand:  Recovering a Sense of Place, p. 150

So I have slept on my desultory feelings regarding yesterday's potato harvest, and feel the need to repent.  Tall is right in her observation captured above:  greed in a gardener is, indeed, offensive.  That anything emerge at all -- meager or abundant -- is, indeed, a gift.  Especially for me.  If this garden is a cooperative effort between Nature and me, then I can only acknowledge receiving the more enviable share.  Nature, in my helping hands, gets the shorter end of the bargain.  True, I am attentive -- to a fault.  True, I am protective.  True, I am eager to learn.  But this latter is an extraction rather than a contributive asset.  It carries within it the hope of future capacities, but speculative tomorrows offer little consolation to the deficits aching today. 

Grace, then, anything this garden manages to deliver this year -- gift and grace.  So I recant my tomato critiques and potato belittlements; recant, as well, my disparagements of the collards' slow pace and the beets' indifference to my schedule.  They are all alive and growing and offering up something of themselves, even if it's not what I pictured in February from the comfort of my recliner.  Their capacity to survive at all in the worst heat and drought in decades -- along with my clumsy ministrations -- should, if anything, inspire wonderment and awe, rather than this gratitude squeezed with as much parsimony as I have accused the garden itself of offering.

So, yet another lesson learned.  This is real life, not the glossy photographs in the seed catalogs.  And however uneven the partnership, Nature and I have cooperated.  Just this morning I tilled up the now-empty potato trenches and scattered a few more left over seeds.  Let the partnership continue!

And come that "worst of winter nights" when I reach into the deep freeze -- or the shelf of canned produce -- this will be the food I most covet and hoard, not simply for the gift of it, but this year for the miracle of it existing at all.

Truly a blessed and "essential ingredient of the life we've made for ourselves here."