Friday, July 22, 2011


When we aren’t digging in the dirt with our hands, our family loves delving into history with our minds.  Sometimes we do both at once…don’t ask me how, but the most engaging discussions usually take place during the more simple occasions in our lives.   Yesterday in particular, Aubrey and I were puzzling over the number of yards required for an 1860’s petticoat while strong-arming ambitious weeds out from between the tomato cages.  The deliberation was not in vain, since we decided on the correct yardage and “saved,” as you might call it, some fifty aspiring tomato plants. 
As if the garden and farm were not quite enough for a summer, the eight of us recently dove heart and soul into reenacting what many call the Civil War.  Thus while we are up to our elbows in the myriad colors and tastes and smells of high summer out of doors, we are up to our knees in the living room with scissors and pins and bits of bright thread and scraps of muslin "Too narrow breadths for nought--except waistcoats for mice," as Miss Potter’s Tailor of Gloucester said. (Unfortunately, we have no mouse-friends to do midnight miracles and save us the trouble of pricked fingers and aching necks as the aforementioned tailor did.)  And amid the feathery arms of carrot tops and out from between the ranks of onions, old battle songs and rallying tunes ring across the field like echoes from tongues long-silent.
The farmer’s market stand, in the meantime, blossoms into full splendor.  If one didn’t know how little of the beauty is truly beholden to one’s own effort one might be in danger of growing remarkably proud.  Setting out the most brilliant displays of produce is a privilege for those who are not afraid to break their finger-nails and scrub the ever-loving dirt out off their hands and feet, but he who is most familiar with the soil knows full well just how much he relies on his Maker for the increase.
I speak of dirt often, when I write about the garden, mostly because I think it is inescapable.  Yet there are also things there that cannot be described well because of their beauty, nor experienced any other place.  The sublimity and grandeur of even the Grand Canyon or a broad range of mountains is frankly hard-put to be more sublime than the scenes that occur in a garden.  There in our garden I stand often on a day-brink, at the top of our path through still-dusky, sleepy woods, my feet in a misty green sea of dewy grass and my eyes blinded by the million morning suns sparkling in our apple trees, dripping and shedding diamonds. 
There, if you linger till late, the sun will bid the day adieu with a glory of blazing smiles and, sweeping up the clouds with his train, send back a final fiery flash before withdrawing behind his counterpane.  Where but in a garden can you watch the bee at his business in his velvet suit; stuffing his pockets with dusty gold from the heart of the rose?  Where but in a garden can you walk down emerald halls under an azure arch and eat freely on every side a feast of heaven’s own making? Each of us is given good gifts every day so that, surrounded as we are by the dirt we so often stir up for ourselves, we remain unable to forget the goodness of God.
Craig, Karen and the Six Arrows

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