BRING TO BLOOM

Dear Spike:

Your mother and I spent the weekend turning the dirt in our vegetable garden. When the frost breaks for good, next month, we’ll plant the seedlings that are now sprouting in our kitchen window.

With all the worries you’ve delivered to us in the past seven months, it gives me great hope to think about the resilience of life, represented by those seeds. Out of almost nothing they spring up, each year, nurtured by only a little dirt and water.

I marvel especially at the sunflowers. From a tiny kernel — the size of your little baby thumb — they grow into towering giants, turning to meet the sun as it breaks above the house in the morning and bowing to its majesty as it sets beyond the trees in the evening.

There is another side to this magnificence, of course. As brown-thumb gardeners, it’s a side we know all too well.

Nature is also very, very delicate.

Each year, we kill far more plants than we manage to bring to bloom. Each year, we tell ourselves that this is the year we’ll succeed.

It seems reasonable to assume that we would become better and better gardeners, over time. But last year was the worst year yet.

On Thursday we visited with our friends, Scott and Leslie, meeting face-to-face for the first time with their son, Miles, who came into this world just a few weeks ago and who we hope will be one of your very close friends.

Your mother has never looked happier to me than she was as she cradled Miles in her arms. But later, as we drove home, she admitted that holding him made her nervous for what is to come.

“He’s so small and delicate,” she said. “And we’re going to have one of those soon.”

Indeed we will.

And so one day soon, you’ll find yourself rising to face the morning sun, turning and stretching to meet its majesty, bowing as it sets.

With each passing day, I know, I’ll fret at your delicateness and marvel at your resilience.

And pray that I turn out to be a better father than a gardener.

Love,
dad