The Year the Garden Went to Grass

The wheelbarrow is tipped up on its nose against the shed wall, where it has been since the end of April, and the grass has come up through the wheel.

Verna is standing at the top of the garden in the last of the light with a cup in her hand, looking at it. Forty summers she has stood at this end of it and looked down the length. She knows where everything was. That is the trouble with a garden going to grass: it does not go blank, it stays exactly where it was and just gets covered.

The bean rows ran down the middle, seven of them, and she put a string line down every year even though she could have done it by eye. The tomatoes were against the fence on the south, staked with the same cedar stakes her father split, and there were twelve of them, always twelve. The raspberry canes are still there, she can see them, they are just standing in grass to the knee and nobody tied them and nobody thinned them and they have gone every direction. Down at the bottom, along the path, was the row of dahlias, and every August she cut them and took them in a jar to whoever needed them, and half this county has had a jar of Verna's dahlias sitting on a kitchen table at one time or another.

This year she put nothing in.

That is not a decision she made in one moment. It happened in pieces. In March she meant to. In the first week of April she got the fork out and did about ten minutes and had to sit down on the step, and the ten minutes cost her the whole rest of the day and most of the next one. She went out again the second week and got about the same. Then it was the end of April, and then it was May, and then the ground got past the point where anything was going in this year, and the grass came, and it came fast, the way it does when nobody has any argument with it.

It is June now. The evening is warm and there is a thrush going somewhere over toward the Ashby's line. The last light is coming low and gold across the fence and lying along the tops of the grass, and it is honestly beautiful out there, which is its own kind of insult.

Verna stands at the top with the cup going cold in her hand.

Somebody came by last week and said, well, it will keep till next year, and somebody else said a garden is a lot of work at your age, and her son said Mom, honestly, nobody minds.

She minds.

And she has not said that out loud to a living soul, because every time she opens her mouth about it somebody hands her a reason to feel better, and she does not want a reason to feel better. She wants somebody to stand at the top of this garden with her and look at the grass and not say anything for a minute.

The psalm says it out loud and nobody fixes it

There is a line in the thirty-first Psalm that most people have read past, because it does not do what religious sentences are supposed to do.

David is in trouble in that psalm, and partway through he stops making his case and just says how it is. He says his life is spent. He says his years have gone in sighing. And then he says the sentence, flat out, with nobody arguing him out of it.

For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing: my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed.Psalm 31:10

Nobody in that psalm is telling him to look on the bright side. There is no editor. He said his strength had failed, in a prayer, out loud to God, and the sentence went into the book and it is still sitting there thousands of years later, unfixed. English versions differ over one word in the second clause and some of them read affliction rather than iniquity, and that argument is not what any of this is for. What is not in dispute is the plain part. My strength faileth. Said to God's face, and kept.

You are allowed to say that out loud, and Scripture made the room for it before you got here. That is not permission I am inventing, it is what is written in Psalm 31:10 and it was never edited out, and the Holy Spirit is the One who put a sentence like that into a hymnbook on purpose, so that a woman with a cup going cold has somewhere to stand.

Because the thing everybody keeps doing to Verna is fixing the sentence. It will keep till next year. Nobody minds. A garden is a lot of work at your age. Every one of those was said in love and every one of them landed as a lid.

You have a real loss on your hands, and Heaven is not calling it something smaller. His word does not deal in tidy versions, and the same Spirit who kept David's worst sentence in the Psalter is not standing in that grass asking anybody to describe it more cheerfully than it is.

What is actually out there under the grass

Nobody is going to stand here and tell Verna the strength is coming back. That is not anybody's to say, and a person who says it is making a promise out of somebody else's life to get out of an uncomfortable minute.

And nobody is going to tell her to be at peace about it either. That is the same move wearing better clothes. It puts the whole job back on her and asks her to produce a feeling she does not have, and calls it maturity when it comes.

So what is actually true, standing at the top of a garden in June.

Forty summers happened. Those beans got eaten. Those jars of dahlias sat on kitchen tables in houses where somebody was having a bad month, and a good many of those people are still alive and still remember the jar. Not one hour of that went into a hole. It is not stored in her legs, which is the mistake grief makes when a capacity goes: it starts thinking the work lived in the body that did it, and that when the body stops the work goes too.

You were the one who did all of it, and none of it has been rescinded. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line about a ledger in Heaven and lays it over forty years of dirt under a woman's fingernails.

And the grass is not a judgment. Grass is what ground does when a person stops. It is not an opinion about her. It came up in April the same way it comes up on a road bank and on a churchyard and everywhere else nobody is holding a hoe, and it means nothing whatever about the woman standing at the top of the row.

You are held by God tonight exactly as you are, with nothing produced and nothing put in. That is what is written in Psalm 31:15, that my times are in Thy hand, and the same Spirit who breathed that line four verses after the one about failed strength is the One holding a woman up in the long grass with a cold cup.