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The Harvest

By Janet Kirchheimer 

It seemed pretty simple at the beginning.  My father showed me how to prepare the soil, to plant the seeds and to water them, and to harvest the vegetables.  If I sustained the garden, the garden would sustain me.  But my relationship with our garden has grown much more complicated than that.  Over time, the garden has sustained me more than I have sustained it. 

In December 1998, my father suffered a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm.  His heart stopped twice during the operation, and he was not expected to survive.  He had an intensive recovery period, and I wanted nothing more than to make him better immediately.  His trauma had made me impatient and afraid to hope.  I was having trouble waiting for things to unfold naturally and wanted to know what would happen in the end. Simple, everyday decisions or occurrences took on great importance.  

For six weeks, I was running between the hospital, home and work, between fear and hope, anxiety and joy.  One January morning, I went out to the garden to check on a small patch of parsley that my father kept covered with blankets to protect it from the snow.  It had been neglected since he went into the hospital.  When I uncovered it, I was surprised to find bright green and fragrant parsley. I began to become filled with hope that like that small patch of parsley that was still flourishing in the winter despite the odds, my father would flourish again as well.  

By the time spring came, my father was regaining his strength.  My father and I tilled and prepared the soil, then began planting the seeds. Though I wanted them to sprout immediately, they had their own timetable.  When they finally did, I was so excited to see them pushing their way up through the dirt and climbing towards the sun. We cared for the seedlings, giving them manure, aerating the soil, watering them daily, doing everything we could so they would keep growing.  But my father would point out that the first rule of gardening is that we are not in control.  We can only wait and watch and enjoy each moment.  As the plants grew stronger, I felt myself growing stronger as well.  Slowly, I was learning to wait and coming to understand that the growth process, like life itself, has a force and rhythm of its own, and that I could rely on it. 

In late July of 1999, we began to harvest.  I especially remember one Sunday morning when my father and I picked string beans, spending more time talking than we did picking.  It took us over an hour to pick a small amount, and those beans became the added bonus to a morning spent being together. By the end of October our "harvest" was in, and we began to prepare the garden to lie fallow for the winter. Our garden had come full circle.  

Over the past three years, my father has taught me much of what he knows about gardening, which is really a lesson about what he knows about life, its rhythms and cycles. Gardeners are optimists.  They plant, believing the seeds will take root, sprout, grow, and that the plants will bear fruit to be harvested.  In spite of being at the mercy of nature, gardeners take it on faith that the garden will thrive despite the odds.  Though I still have more to learn, I'm becoming an optimist, too. 

Now it's mid-winter, and I'm buying seed packets and thinking ahead to the vegetables we'll plant this spring.  Three years have passed since my father's aneurysm, but I still have moments when the trauma is very close, and it is difficult for me to trust in the future.  It is at these moments that I think about what I have learned from my father and the garden about life, about hope and about letting go.

 

To read additional articles by Janet Kirchheimer, click here. 

    

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