Goodnight Garden

As I pulled the last of the barren stalks from the garden to put it to bed for the winter ahead, I couldn’t help but thank them for the bounty they provided us this year. While our vegetables may not have been as abundant this year as in previous years, it gave us so much more.

A year of wildly colorful flowers that brought joy into our home every week. An idea for a new product to add to my small business offerings. Veggies to nourish our bodies. And learnings. The garden gave us more clarity on what it can do for us in the years to come and what we want from it. The veggies, the flowers, and even the fruit.

But mostly, the garden taught us love and mindfulness. Every morning we’d take our alone time in the garden to see what the night had brought. Sometimes I’d sit on the bench while Nora ran back and forth along the path and sometimes I’d just sit in the silence of the morning with my coffee still groggy-eyed from sleep. I’d walk or sit in the garden and dream of it’s future and what it will grow into in the years to come living in this house. How hopefully, one day, I will have a little one in tow who can practice their words by telling me what they seeing growing that morning.

And every night, we’d walk through the garden as a family of three. We’d harvest the veggies for dinner that night or lunch the next day and share a tomato or zucchini snack with Nora. We’d pull out the watering can and fill it to the top for Nora to grab a quick drink before giving the plants their drink. Most nights we watered in silence, on our unspoken assignments: me the garden beds and AJ the back and side yards.

I like to think that as we watered in silence, we were both thanking the gardens for giving us something to nurture and bring to life every year. Thanking the garden surrounding our home for providing us comfort during a tumultuous few years. Something to lean on when we needed reassurance. Something to watch grow and flourish and know that we helped it. That we helped to nurture each and every plant to sprout, grow and bloom.

And now, again in silence, we cleaned the garden up, covered her and said our last thank yous until next year when we can nurture and help her grow again.