Last Sunday, after a morning of worship, I took an afternoon off to bask in the warm sunshine and walk in the garden. The rows of lettuce, cabbage, radish, and potatoes were doing quite well considering we had little rain in recent weeks. In fact, the taters were doing so well that they really needed some dirt mounded up around them. In the wanderlust of leaving the house on such a beautiful, heaven-sent day, I had forgotten to grab my garden hoe. Regardless, I plopped down upon my knees and began to scoop handfuls of loose soil about the dark green sprouts. The warmth of the earth trickled over my palms flooding my head with precious memories of grandma and dad working on Sunday afternoon in their gardens.
“There is something about working in the dirt with your hands,” father would tell me as he showed me how to cultivate the rich, dark soil of the fertile lands along the Wabash River. “You don’t need a hoe, 
just use your hands,” he said as he held up his dirt ladened palms. The black earth had worked its way underneath his nails so that he honestly looked as if he had been living as a barbarian for some time.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to use a hoe,” I asked, not understanding the message.
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “How you gonna feel the earth with a hoe,” he responded.
So, there is sat, hands covered in dirt as I pulled heaping piles of rich, dark red dirt up around my taters thinking of those sweet days gone by. The garden and springtime were essential to our families. Grandma always canned as if she were feeding a multitude, which generally she was. You never left her house without some canned goodie or baked something or other. The root cellar always had the essential to last us through the year. The only time I recall going to the grocery for her was the time Deep and I got in trouble with the supposed pet skunk, but then that’s another story. The trip to the grocery in that circumstance was in order to air us out on our half-mile journey to and from the store. If you pulled up to grandpa and grandma’s and couldn’t find anyone at the house, you knew they were either in the kitchen garden just behind the house or across the field in the big garden behind Mrs. Wolf’s house. You would know to be careful when you reached the small pasture gate. It was maybe fifty yards across to the garden gate, but it might as well have been a mile when one of K.D.’s bulls was in there. So, with great caution, you always were certain to look both ways before crossing to see what manner of livestock might be grazing nearby.
From time to time, even when I didn’t have a place to call my own, like now, I found a way to have a garden. When my wife and I were stationed at Warner Robbins AFB, in Warner Robbins Georgia, I found that airmen were allowed garden lots. All you had to do was sign up at the MWR Center, and they would assign you your very own plot. There in that foreign soil, mostly sand and clay, I found another crop of vegetables soon filling our produce baskets to overflowing. It was there that I also learned how to grow peanuts, something I had never imagined. But once more, armed with just a hoe and a tater fork, I turned the soil the old-fashioned way, by hand. Grandma would tell me, “The connection to the earth and the land make us one with our maker.” She would then gently remind me the passage from the book of Genesis, “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground, For out of it you were taken; For dust you are, And to dust you shall return.”
So many lessons learned, many while working in the garden, so many memories made. Those are seeds of faith planted which are to be harvested throughout our lives.
I don’t guess it’s any wonder that one of my favorite old time gospel hymns is “In the Garden.”
The day that Ms. Frankie and I sang it in the church was another special day in my life. Ms. Frankie had suffered from Alzheimers for some time. At that point in her life, the illness had progressed to the point she could no longer read or write. But when we would sing together, she remembered more lyrics than I did to many songs; all you had to do was get her started. That morning, there in Goldston United Methodist Church, we made beautiful music together and memories to last a lifetime.
Ms. Frankie passed a couple years after that, and they played the video from that day at her funeral. The tears rolled down my cheeks as I listened with bowed head to the sound of her singing once more, knowing that she was watching us all from heaven that day, singing along while holding her husband John’s hand. She was indeed walking in His garden that day as well.
Here is the video of that wonderful day.
Sometimes, my hands in the earth are all I need to make my day complete.
We came from the earth and to the earth, we shall return. There we will become one with the soil and add to the abundant life everlasting of those who come afterward. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.” – Genesis 2:7
Yes, walk in the garden and feel the presence of our Lord. Your life will never be the same.
Thanks be to God.
