A Lesson from Gardening
My class and I (kids from Utah and Idaho) were discussing food supply disruption, quarantining, TP shortages, a bunch of other things. One of my students said it didn’t matter what happened, because his family was going to be fine. “Why is that?” I said.
“Because we just planted a garden,” he said.
“I’m very glad to hear it,” I said. “What will you eat next Wednesday?”
As humans, we have experience with mass extinction. Depending on where you live, it could come in October or November (or May or June), but it will come, make no mistake, and take with it the greens of summer, the ripe berries, even the hard, late fruits we can store in the cellars. Winter has her time.
We know, having been through many thousands of these cycles now, that April comes again, and we will put seeds in the ground, and the flowers will show their bright heads, and the trees will bud and bloom and set. For every November, there is a June.
But March can be very lean in the meantime.
With this virus, like it or not, we have a mass extinction. Some of that was caused by government, but please remember — the NBA was first. Not a governmental agency. NCAA tournaments shut down long before the government issued any directives to anyone. We closed dance competitions, churches, foreign trips, soccer matches, spring training, all that before Washington tweeted a line. So some of it, yes, was government, but most of it — by far the most of it — was us ordinary people. Being cautious. Trying to protect ourselves and the people we love. Voluntarily, because we are good, in the main.
When we did that, we brought a hard frost down on the garden, and much of it — so much we don’t even know yet — was killed. Photographers. Videographers. Theater owners. Stage crews. Choirs. Orchestras. Conductors. Reception centers. Concessionaires. Convention organizers. Public speakers. Event planners. Restaurateurs. Cooks. Waitstaff. Pilots. Cabin crews. Excursion operators. I’m forgetting dozens of others. I believe they’ll be impossible to forget, soon enough, because they’ll be everywhere.
We seem to have got used to the winter enough to start talking spring. Perhaps it’s too early for the trees to be budding or the daffodils to burst open their golden fireworks, but can you blame us? February is awful. It’s unendurable. Even three days less than other months, it’s soul-crushing. We long for March. Maybe our blooms will be frost-killed, but many people have reached the point that they just can’t stand the gray any longer. Can anyone truly blame us?
And yet, March is a long, long way from June, much less September. Gardens come back, but they take a long time to grow. Tomato plants are beautiful in May, but not terribly nourishing. Our heavy viral frost and the deep black blanket of epidemic has cost us much, and many plants will survive, but some won’t. Some are gone, and there will be bare patches where food once grew, but now there is nothing.
Be kind. Summer is coming, but it is not here yet. There are, all around us, those whose gardens suffered far more than ours has. Perhaps the bricklayer scorns the actor when the theater shuts down, and says he should be more prudent, more practical in his choice of career. Perhaps. But come a Friday night, when the bricklayer downs his tools, is it a wall he wants to see on his television? Would he not give much to get the creators back to their creations?
All of us have suffered. There is more suffering to come, because though peaches are delicious, one cannot eat the buds. We will come back. Our gardens will produce, and more than we can eat. For now, though, for all of us to survive, we will need to dig into our cellars and share our stores, and prune, and dig, and plant. Give a bit more. Buy something we don’t strictly need, so that there will still be makers when the sun warms us all again. So many of our friends cannot do this. They need us now more than ever. Will we see them?
I believe in the bountiful harvest to come. But only if we work together will we all be there for the feast.