This week I have been working in my flower beds that have unwanted weeds crossing the border and infringing on my territory. I guess weeds have a place in the bigger plan but there are so many of them and they thrive regardless of the weather. My mother loved flowers and battled so to have them in the years after dad died. We did what we could to help but if you’re a gardener, you know her regret that she couldn’t do it herself.

It is so therapeutic to work in a garden. Mom loved to get her hands in the dirt. While I wore gloves she used bare hands. I asked how she could stand dirt under her fingernails but she said she didn’t mind……she loved to feel the dirt. Mom always preferred being outdoors to being in the house. The first born of six children she loved to walk the furrows behind her dad as he plowed the field with a horse.

I’m a long way from a plowed field with a horse but some things travel down the genetic line and you come to it sooner or later in life. I’ve talked similarly about this before and also the lady who lived across the street when I was first married. She had been widowed years before and I marveled at the time she spent fussing over her flowers. I thought her to be deranged at the time. How presumptuous of me.

It took years but now I’m an old lady myself…….and yes! I do fuss over flowers as the “deranged” neighbor did before me. Time and life sift us down to basics and all the stuff we thought we had to have is meaningless. Time to think about how wonderfully extraordinary our earth is. How life is given to the most minute seed if we see it or not. The intricacy of God’s world is beyond our comprehension until we pick up a little dirt in our hand……..

Essentially Esther