Bare Ground to Bounty...

...and other contemplations

 

Living in a four-season State is such a blessing.

Sure, most of us here in The Mitten sing a pretty dreary song if you listen in around, oh, mid-Februaryish; it's difficult to stay positive some days when it's so cold it hurts to breathe through your freezing nose.

But as I sit here contemplating closing up windows and turning on the air conditioner in this First-week-of-September Heat Wave, listen to the stock pot simmering full of delectable-smelling pasta sauce, made of perfectly ripe heirloom tomatoes, freshly picked herbs, garlic, and green peppers, I glance out at the teeming green space in the back yard where most of it came from, and am once again humbled and enthralled by the miracle that each year takes tiny seeds, and uses them to turn a bare piece of dirt into bounty.

The "extra" time afforded us by me being here full time now is allowing us to take the most advantage of our garden as we ever have, and it shows in the jars of salsa, dilly beans, and stewed tomatoes on the basement shelves, and the green beans, zucchini, winter squash, and other delights in vacuum sealed bags in the freezer. Even with the added time, I find myself wondering if I'll come close to harvesting and utilizing all there is available in this one small plot of ground. I grow impatient with myself on the days when it seems I'm still standing on the ice berg's tip, looking up.

But patience grows like a garden - imperceptibly, yet steady - on it's way to producing fruit through us.

With each snap of a green bean, each tomato cored and sliced, every pepper picked, and every jar lid announcing it's seal with a "pop!", I feed more than our stomachs, and learn more about myself, the family I come from, and the Creator of it all.

I repurpose a few strands of baling twine in the Stone Cottage, and on the mini-greenhouse where the seedlings grew this Spring, weave a haphazard pattern of lines from which herbs can be hung to dry after harvest. While tomatoes and beans and other heat-loving veggies are harvested and put up, kale stands patient and green, knowing the frosts coming next month will only make its taste sweeter. Pumpkins and winter squash begin to ripen, large and orange and yellow beneath their sprawling vines.

The bare ground beneath the bounty is hardly visible now, and as I sweat through harvesting and preserving the glut of food given us this season, it's hard to imagine a few short months from now this lush green space will once again be cold and bare, taking it's rest from it's summer labors while it waits to welcome next year's tiny seeds. And I am thankful for the places my road has forked and dead-ended, leading me back time and again to the clean quiet of Wit's End, where God can take my spirit from the bare ground of of my humanness, to the bounty of His blessings.