The Next Step

My father has always had a beautiful vegetable garden. It's larger then most vegetable gardens that people enjoy as a hobby. It spans 150 feet and is at least 30 feet wide. Around the garden is a wooden fence that is about six feet high and has a swinging gate at both ends. As a child, it was a wonderful place to play. My brother and I would chase each other through the corn that towered above our heads, and hide in the pole beans that formed leafy tents. In the garden there was an earthy smell, as the scent of manure and fresh vegetables mingled.

Some of the days we would play in the garden were Sundays, and my father would be Barbecuing a chuck steak with his secret "butter and parsley" basting sauce. This filled the air with a succulent aroma that intertwined with the summer breeze. That aroma would excel our hunger, and we would pull fresh tomatoes from the vine and bite into them, sending juice and seeds up both cheeks and ultimately dripping on our shirt fronts. There was a horseshoe court in front of the garden. Often the metallic clang of the horseshoes hitting the spike and the shouts that followed could be heard in the distance. There is a equilibrium there, almost a sense of wealth. The garden moved in a perpetual motion, repeating its cycles every year.

Autumn would come and the garden would be naked and barren, nothing remaining except the refuge of the harvest. Corn stalks would still stand, some leanining, their rich green leafs having turned to brown. The tomato vines would be withered and decaying. They would begin the process of returning to the same earth they sprouted from just a few short month before. The veil of winter would soon be cast over the garden. Then nothing but the fence would be exposed through the blanket of snow, standing like a monument to the great area it encloses. The garden would be left to sleep and regenerate its fertile soil.

Then spring would come and my father would gently awaken the noble patch of earth. The dirt would be kneaded and turned then smoothed and plowed. My father would sit at the table at night and draw little maps of his rectangle world. "The corn will go here, and I think I'll rotate the tomatoes to this area," he would say. Soon the seeds were carefully planted, fed, and watered. The tomatoes he had started and nurtured in his coldframe would be moved to their assigned locations. And the garden would begin to bloom again.

In later years, I never lost the awe as I walked down the garden's center path, and admire its rich bounty exploding from the ground year after year. I parallel The garden's cycles with my own life. And ultimately, I parallel it with the entire universe. Like the garden, there is no beginning or end; there is only the next step.