Dreaming and Drooling While Turning Down the Pages

I am old enough to remember the enormous Sears and Roebuck catalogue that routinely arrived through the mail each year, but young enough to have missed out on all the associated excitement that arrival once carried with it.   At once a toy, hardware, clothing, musical instrument and even house plans store, that original catalogue brought entire malls into one's living room.  It's not that we no longer shop through the mail.  The tonnage of specialty catalogues that pass from my mailbox directly into my recycling bin each month evidences that someone is doing it.  And what is Amazon.com except a virtual version of the old all-purpose catalogue?  In the last year I have purchased everything from books to automotive supplies, garden tools to kitchen tools from this friendly online retailer, and doubt that the new year will be any different.

Some of us don't mind the wait; others of us hate fighting the mall crowds and the parking lots; still others are confined to their homes but explore -- and shop -- the world online.  But the lure of the immediate killed off the door-stop catalogue.  Target and WalMart and Home Depot are just down the street, and even if I can't find exactly what I want there, "close enough" is usually "good enough."

But some gratifications are necessarily delayed -- especially when it comes to gardening.  Winter is the gardening season of imagination, of anticipation, of vicarious salivation, above all...waiting.  It will be months before the seeds are started in the greenhouse under lights; months beyond that before the first soil is turned; months still further out before the first pepper or tomato is picked.  Winter, for the gardener, is the season of dreaming, planning, and waiting.  The dormant preacher in me recalls that there is a lot of that going around this time of year.

Advent, in the church's alternative ordering of time, is the season of waiting.  As the four weeks leading up to Christmas, it is the season reaching back into the soul and psyche of the Hebrew prophets who watched and waited for -- and pointed toward -- something better.  The first reading of this first Sunday of this year hears Jeremiah anticipate "those days" when "a righteous Branch" will spring up, implicitly calling attention to what for all the world looks like "dead wood" surrounding us these days.

Paralleling the story of Mary's pregnancy, Advent is the season of waiting (as one of my teachers cleverly put it, with a nod toward every pregnancy) for what never seems to come.  Days are short.  Nights are long.  The end seems nowhere in sight.  Depending on one's attitude about such things, the chilly air nudges us to "cozy" or "huddle" or "close" in beneath layers of whatever keeps us warm.

And as best as we are able, we wait.  Sometimes aching, sometimes dreaming, sometimes doggedly slogging through; looking forward when we aren't looking down.

And so it is that in what has to be the perfect Advent symbol, the first two seed catalogues arrived yesterday in the mail.   Pages and pages of colorful photos of ripened vegetables and fruits -- anticipatory savories and sweets -- beckoning the imagination spring-ward.  Seeds for this bean and that herb; this brassica and that allium; this cucurbit and that nightshade.  Heaven's harvest complete with an order form.

I've already begun to dog-ear pages.

And salivate.  Happy Advent.