Words as Seeds

Gardening can be a funny thing at times. You plant something and it grows into what you thought it would; but other times, something else entirely comes up. Maybe a few wayward gloriosa daisy seeds got mixed into the marigold seeds, or the morning glories came up part morning glory, part moonflower. That's nature for you. Not always perfect but always always interesting.
 


Take the volunteer plants in the compost pile. You toss potato peelings in there, along with a few dead and shrunken pumpkin carcasses. And the next year, voila! The best potatoes and pumpkins you ever ate growing there unbidden, undrafted. One year, a small tomato plant appeared in a pot of soil on my porch, and not knowing what it was but allowing my curiosity to best me, I let it be...watered it, monitored it all that summer, until the characteristic blossoms emerged followed by tiny green fruit. And ultimately, I was rewarded with the sweetest most delicious miniature yellow pear tomatoes I've ever eaten. And that's nature for you.




And then there's another type of seed that isn't sold in packets or out of bins at the grain store. And you don't plant them in soil, which means none of the backbreaking work of tilling and feeding new ground in the spring when the earth is more muckhole than paradise. These seeds you simply scatter across a sheet of pristine paper or a shiny glowing screen, and then you sit back and let them take root.




Like their biological and botanical counterparts, they need regular feedings and watering. But these are again accomplished, not by conventional means, but rather by surrounding the naked seeds with imagination, pulling the soil of other ideas firmly up around their delicate stems, and then watering them as needed with tears and sometimes even with blood, a rather unorthodox approach to gardening, to be sure. And at the end of the day, after the tilling and the planting and the watering are done, you'd swear you'd put in a day's work in the broiling sun, slapping mosquitoes away and wondering if it is indeed all worth it.




And each and every time without fail, it is.


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