I had a morning at home yesterday, a luxury recently with getting up early to meet my friends to walk and run several mornings a week, Keith’s physical therapy, and church. I slept in until 7 and took my coffee and devotional books to the back porch. The birds were waking up and greeting the day. A little wren parked herself on the porch railing and talked and talked to me. I could tell she was not happy with my presence and later I found her nest hidden down in a bucket. Can you imagine going up against a huge giant that you think may be endangering your children with only your small chirpy voice as a weapon?
After breakfast and morning chores, I grabbed my work gloves and hoe and headed to the vegetable garden. My friend Bill had brought his little tractor over back in the spring and plowed me up a few rows. I asked him to move the garden over a little this year and the grass has been coming up stubbornly, as it to say that it was there first. It was threatening to take over.
I’m a fair-weather gardener. I can’t take the full sun anymore, so if I have serious work to do I have to get out before it gets too hot here in Northwest Georgia. In the evenings I piddle, pull a few weeds, water, and tie up a tomato, but nothing that might make me sweat.
So I was glad to have the cool morning to hoe the grass that has come up around my butterbeans, one sad row that will probably yield just enough for Keith and me to eat in a meal. This was my first year to try planting butterbean seeds. My granddaddies both planted them, and I remember sitting on the front porch as a child shelling the little beans into an enamel pan. My mother cooked them up, swimming in butter.
I finished the short row of butterbeans and started on the green beans, blue lake variety because we don’t like to deal with stringy beans. Few cars come down our country lane at mid morning, and all was quiet. Far off I could hear the train whistle, and way off across the pasture an owl gave a faint whooo. I leaned on my hoe and listened, wondering if these were the same sounds women have heard in our little piece of the valley for the last 160 years, weeding their vegetable gardens on a June morning. I imagined myself in a long skirt and straw hat instead of my shorts and ballcap— how hot that must have been!
The cucumber vines are full of yellow flowers but no little cukes yet, a few green tomatoes are showing promise, and I pulled one small pepper from the vine to eat with our supper. Squash is coming in slowly.
A huge watermelon vine and tomato bush are growing out of my compost bin, looking healthier than if I had tried to grow them. Why do we call plants we didn’t plant volunteers? Because they chose to do the work of growing?
God and I talk in the garden and my mind is free to wander.
Under the Magnolia Tree 