You Trust That One Day You Will Harvest Fruit

Too many, too many, too many commitments this week. Three evening meetings that left this morning person wanting to stick pins in my eyes and beg for mercy. Too busy to attend the strawberry growing class at Farmer D's. And too darn sick of our endless rain to connect long enough and well enough with either of the gardens (my home one and the community garden).

On my way to pick up my Riverview Farms CSA box mid-week, I stopped by Farmer D's and got into a long talk with his new store manager, Darby, a young farmer from Vermont who just moved here and must be shocked at our rain and cold, especially so early in October. Darby gave me the crash course in organic strawberry growing in the South (how she knows this already, I don't know, and here I am, having left New York City twenty years ago TODAY). I ended up buying a flat of strawberries, pre-holed landscape cloth and the hardware to attach the cloth to a raised bed. I knew Bob was building the raised bed this week and now I would have the rest of what we needed to get Farmer Bob's Stawberry Patch in place ("I used to hang out with zoning lawyers," Bob told me, "and now I hang out with gardeners and farmers. When did this happen?")

After a city comprehensive plan steering committee meeting, in the dark, rainy night, I showed Bob the strawberry flat in the glass-paned hatchback of my Prius and I got to thinking how well they were doing there, warm and dry, and the next logical thought, of course, was, "Hey, why can't I just drive around all winter with a small raised bed of lettuces in my trunk as a greenhouse?" These are the kinds of things I convince myself are good ideas.

And then, Saturday morning, after a full Friday of endless emails trying to solve what seemed to be one problem after another and a final email I sent that said, simply, "My brain hurts," I came to dig in the garden, even though it was an "official garden workday," even though I "should" have been mulching or scraping paint from the pavilion.

Bob put the bed together (and I have to tell you, one of the funniest emails I got all week was from him, when he responded to mine with "There's a joke in there but I will definitely let it slide." Mine had said, "We need your power tool to attach the landscape cloth to the bed—I have the hardware"). We added the landscape cloth (no drip line as recommended in the directions handout Darby gave us) and then Rebecca (remember Rebecca?) and I tried to figure out how to plant the strawberry plugs. It was nearly impossible to dig a little hole.

"I don't know if I ever got the roots in," Rebecca told me. How could that be? But then I tried and I saw what she meant. We were doing all this work above the landscape cloth, not knowing if we were being effective underneath. I looked back at the directions and it said to poke a hole with the round handle of the trowel and then just drop the plug in the hole. Just drop the plug in the hole. As simple as that.

I stepped back and watched this brilliant and beautiful woman who dropped out of the sky into the hole in my life that has since been filled by this community garden. This gifted-certified high school teacher, who has taken some time off from work to care for her young children, is always diplomatic with difficulties, always quick with a laugh, and knows exactly who needs a kind word when. She is self-effacing in a generous way that makes everyone immediately comfortable, openly honest and insatiably inquisitive. I watched as she gently poked a hole and planted a plug. Poke and plant. Poke and plant. Not brain surgery, yet it healed my hurting brain.

I felt the stresses of the week wash away. I felt the issues of yesterday shrink in size. I felt like that's all there is to it, to life. You poke a hole and then you plant in it. You poke and plant. And when others poke those holes in your day, you still fill them the same way. You plant something good. Something fruitful. And you trust that one day, you will reap what you have sown.

As simple as that.