Planting and Postcards

I can even see her face as I remember back to April.
“Let’s do it. Where are they?” She was determined this year. Undeterred by the chill of the air or the daunting nature of the task, she headed out to the garden with a purposeful stride. It was planting season and she was here again. Last year she was here too, with a spade, turning under sod by hand. This year, with that same spade, we easily turned over last year’s garden, thawed from winter and ready for another season.
“I want to come when you are planting your garden,” she had said by phone in early March. “When is that?” And I reassured her that we would be fine- that I could handle planting a garden by myself, and she again insisted “It makes the most sense. Besides, I like to work in the garden.”
Oh, that sister of mine. Through the years, when I was afraid to get my hands dirty, leery of the creepy-crawlies lurking behind this leaf or that, she dug and planted and harvested and found satisfaction there.
Years later, on an Iowan farm in the middle of nowhere, in the peace of an early-spring afternoon, she and I soaked in quiet while three small kids slept indoors.
She pushed each onion set gingerly into the earth, stringing underground pearls one by one. “Like this? Am I spacing them too closely together?”
“Oh, that’s hard to do,” I reassured her. And bit by bit we dug knees and muddy fingers into cool dirt and planted barren garden into hope of something more. And as we finished each row we measured with a stick to keep them straight. There was always much discussion on which stick in particular had been used to measure the last row (for the sake of consistency) and we both take it seriously\, as if the perfect planting of onion rows mattered beyond tomorrow. We hunched back down and planted, methodically, letting conversation steer us far from this piece of earth and into other times, other places.

And now, in the cool of a September morning, I go out and dig buried treasure; harvesting the bounty from what we started that day. The onions are plump and ready for drying and braiding and hanging out. The garden will once again be barren, the onions, eaten and enjoyed, and all that will remain is the wisp of time spent stitching those memories into hearts on that quiet afternoon in spring.

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It always amazes me that people will come and get dirty right next to me- painting walls or planting gardens or feeding sheep-the mess of daily life is something we often work hard to avoid. And yet time and again they come. And time and again, shoulder to shoulder, we work. And while so much of contemporary life allows us to be disconnected and individual, the yoke of work such as this asks us to pull on each other, to yoke up and walk in the same direction, to keep pace.

And in the moment we think we are planting a garden or tearing off a roof or canning tomatoes. But that dust soon settles and I realize that the work itself was nothing more than the tool used to stitch something lasting out of the temporary, fleeting everyday.

We pull them out and dust them off like cherished postcards from long ago, those memories made during the ordinary tasks of daily life.