With the spring came spades and puddles, soon replaced by the birth of new animals including six new goslings swimming around the pond. The heat increased and the frosty nights are gone. The baby bears jump and frolic in the heat, the momma bear stretches and withdraws from hibernation. The final straw was the leaves on the trees turning green. Yes, ladies and gentleman, it's garden time!
A driving instinct, nearly as basic as the desire to make water run uphill, is the need to assert your little bit of one with Mother Nature by growing a green plant to the beautiful expectations provided in the pictures of your local home and garden magazine.
You take out your seeds, rotor tillers, spade and all the other appropriate gardening equipment as per your mother, mother-in-law, father, father-in-law, local gardening green thumb, Dr. Phil or Oprah, and access all their information to help grow that perfect plant. You till the soil and plant the plants, you smile fondly at each other as you start your garden with your family, as the fresh black soil fills your nostrils with the promise of the bounty you will enjoy upon harvest.
Ahhhhhh, the dreams of dreamers is such a wonderful thing.
Soon you hit your finger between your favorite garden tool and a rock, but you continue to smile, imparting words of love-itude and joy as the birds chirp and the children frolic. You discover that a thistle plant has also decided to grow in your garden and must be removed. We have forgotten our gloves though, so you walk back to the house in search of the gloves you need, only to discover every right hand glove has been eaten by the glove gnome who lives under the stairs.
As you return to your garden to pull this thistle from the promised land, you discover said thistle may in fact be attached to the center of the Earth and most probably will need to be removed by track-hoe, earth mover or crane. You chop it off. Damn thistle, there, can't see it no more.
The rocks have evidently multiplied when you went to the house and now the baby bears carry said rocks to an increasingly larger pile growing at the end of the rows. Love and joy is in the air! You comment on that love and joy only to discover your momma bear does not share your enthusiasm. In fact, she has the capacity to pitch for the Blue Jays as the potato she was planting takes the hat off your head.
The sweat on your brow and the sun on your back make you smile as your crooked little garden starts to come together. Wait a minute? Where did the sun go? Uh-oh, run family, run! Thunderstorm! With big rain drops, lots of wind, and solid little white chunks of rain that resemble snow. Grrrrrrr, Mother Nature ... !@#$%^%$#@#$% bad word, snarl, snarl bark.
As you continue your struggle through the year, the thoughtless thistle pokes its head out again and again until you pull out the Round-up and smoke the poor plant and a resulting six feet of garden as well. This disturbs the Momma Bear, but the thistle is dead, and she has planted all the tater projectiles.
Hill the potatoes, cut down the weeds, trim the tomatoes, pick the beans, shell the peas, can, can, can, freeze, freeze, freeze you start to wonder why the heck Martha Stewart is still smiling in her magazine. I suspect it's because she too has succumbed to the use of pesticides, but has had too many imbibed into her system, thus is in a permanent state of euphoria.
At the end of it all we will all look back on our summer of garden and say, "Isn't Sobey's easier?" The ultimate truth is that it probably is. Funny thing though, scraped knuckles, prickled hands and sore backs are not the memories I still have from being a kid. For some reason I only remember the smiles and laughs.
A garden is a labour of love for a whole family of bears in our little corner of God's green Earth, and while the harvest may be veggies, the true bounty in that garden is memories created there. Gardens may come and go with the season, but the little seeds of family are planted in the fertile soils of our minds for the rest of our days.
Funny what you find in the garden if you look hard enough.
