Hello Loves,
There's a pure blue sky and the morning's golden sun is pouring itself out, making everything it touches golden, too. It's calling to me, so I know you'll understand if this one's short. Wink.
My tools are already out there, waiting. The wheelbarrow and shovel, the pulaski and garden trowel. I have plants, too, ready to go into their summer beds. And seeds, yes. If I can be in the sun, working the soil, listening to birds and the very full creek, with a curious and helpful(?) dog by my side, it's a slice of paradise for me (yes, even the digging by hand with a pulaski of those new very rocky flowerbeds).
Because I remember.
I remember gardening right alongside my grandparents, tending the food that we all would share. I remember being on my hands and knees with my grandpa, weeding the potatoes. He suffered from perpetual back pain, and found that he could weed much easier on hand and knees than he could upright with a hoe. So, there we were, crawling the garden together.
I remember my dad, marking rows across the garden with a wooden tool that he'd made. Long, even rows, and then we dropped seeds in dashed lines down their centers. I was probably only four.
I'm sure there were ages and stages of my childhood that I didn't like gardening 'work' (I distinctly remember not liking to pick rows upon rows of raspberries when I was about seven - oh, give me that now! I'll do it!), but by my teen years, I loved it.
Because maybe I'd made the discovery - tending food and beauty settles the unsettled and fixes what needs fixing.
It also fills the plates, the jars, and the larder.
I suppose you could say that the simplicity that begins in the garden, extends to our table.
Because we've begun to understand that the best health insurance is what goes into our mouths, it's important to us to eat foods that are whole and wild, free-range and grass-fed. We also eat organic when possible.
This is our guide, however; it's not our dictator. Far from purists, we do our best, eat in gratitude, and ask God to bless it (and welcome Stouffer's lasagna on paper plates, sometimes).
Come Monday, I'll have more words for you here, about food, and our journey with that. Right now? I'm dashing out to my garden for some of that golden sun.
Have the lovelies of weekends, friends!
