My daughter is getting married next summer.
The date is (almost) set. The priest has shared the preparation plan. We’ve walked venues and talked menus. This ball is definitely rolling.
I’m seizing the moment. If the wedding is a year from now, then the garden of right now is going to tell me all kinds of things about how to plan all the wedding events that Katie, my daughter, insists will happen here, in her very own backyard. I always promise myself that I will take copious garden notes. And then I file them in my head somewhere. This year, there are actual notes. Plenty of notes.
I will be ordering bulbs soon, and more perennials. I’m noting those blank spots where I can’t seem to get anything to grow. I will bury things, bulbs and seeds and tubers, and I will believe that they will rise, more beautiful than I could have imagined. And most of all, I’m promising to save every penny I need to lay down abundant mulch early in the spring. I will defeat the weeds, at least better than I usually do.
Engagements bring out the romantic in almost all of us, and Katie’s engagement was picture perfect. A perfectly timed surprise in her favorite place followed by a joyous gathering of people who are delighted for this young couple. In the rosy afterglow of an engagement — when everything still sparkles as brightly as her ring — it is so easy to believe in happily-ever-after. Hope is abundant when everything is in bloom. It’s a little harder on the ordinary Tuesdays in late summer when the weeds are winning, and everything I want to grow looks like it’s wilting in the heat. Who will we be next summer? The garden next July is being decided in the heat of this one. And the wedding next July will bear the fruit of the choices I’m making in this garden today.
Gardeners are a strange breed. We spend (a lot of) money on things we bury in (expensive) dirt. We put ugly brown tubers into the ground with every expectation that they will become abundant dahlias. We cut back plants that look happy and healthy because we know that pruning is not punishment; it is priority. So many of the tasks in the garden ask us to believe in a future that we can only imagine.
Christian marriage asks for the same imagination. This isn’t the stuff of fairy tales; this is the imagination of faith. Together, a couple spends years planting things whose beauty they will only see in the distant future. They sow seeds of emotional trust. They stake one another upright when the storms come. They water a deep and sustaining friendship with ordinary conversations. They are careful to weed out the daily resentments before contempt takes root. They spread the mulch of mercy thick enough to keep bitterness from taking root. They trust that grace is doing hidden work beneath the surface long before the blooms unfurl. Marriage is the lifelong work of cultivating something good for the glory of God.
Maybe this is why so many mothers love gardens, and maybe this is why gardening so often becomes the joy of women who have lived long seasons of motherhood. We have grown accustomed to the rhythm of a life spent planting for seasons we cannot yet see. We read one more bedtime story, cook one more family dinner, insist on one more apology, whisper one more furtive prayer. Tucking the seeds into fertile soil, burying the bulbs with care. It’s ordinary work, and for a long time, it looks as though nothing at all is happening.
And we hope to take all the experience of years past — all the notes on when to plant and when to wait, what to put where and how the sun shifts, who the predators are and how to deter them — and use that wisdom to make the future brighter, better and more beautiful.
Wisdom fuels our hope. So, this year I’ll make my notes. I’ll order the bulbs. I’ll save for the mulch. I’ll imagine next July, when family and friends will gather beneath these trees (so many trees!) to celebrate a new marriage.
I am both careful and hopeful. I have learned that gardens are not made in July. They are made in all the ordinary days beforehand, when someone kneels in the dirt and chooses to believe in spring.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
