A cold, wet spring and a few sneaky deer challenged my daddy’s lifelong routine of when, where and how to plant the various vegetables during garden season this year.
He remembers helping his dad when he was just a little guy, dropping purple hull pea seeds between the corn stalks.
Now, 70 years later, he’s still planting those purple hull pea seeds — along with every garden delicacy you can imagine — each year on that same land where he was taught.
One of the must-dos has always been to finish planting by the Fourth of July, even if it meant working that day, he said.
But this year, he planted and replanted his peas, then replanted again. The third time was in late July, his first time ever to plant so late in the season.
My mom and dad’s fresh vegetable dishes rival any meat-and-three restaurant you’ll find, and while I’m always ready for a home-cooked meal, the summer Sunday dinners are my favorite.
Will I get fresh peas when I visit soon? Not sure. We are all watching and waiting to see what happens.
If we don’t, it’s definitely not from a lack of dad trying to make it happen. As each obstacle surfaced, he pulled the plow back out and started over, adapting as needed to find success.
Watching the rows and rows of freshly tilled land sprout into delicate little leaves and eventually into overgrown stalks hanging full of produce has always been part of my life — as well as my mom and dad’s and their parents’ and grandparents’ lives.
And while my top contribution to the effort now is to go back for seconds, I remember helping prepare, plant, pick and package — shell, shuck, wash and either freeze or can. I can still feel the sensation of the freshly plowed dirt on my bare feet, and the sting of the okra when picking it. Oh, and what about the purple finger nails we all got to keep for a few days after shelling peas?
With each step of the process, we had a schedule, a plan and an expectation. We all worked hard to fulfill the role we had been assigned, even the little guy dropping seeds between each cornstalk 70 years ago.
When things didn’t work out like we had hoped, we adapted, adjusted and started again. We also accepted the reality of when it was time to let something go or upgrade a system that had previously worked just fine but now needed to function a little differently.
Like when dad installed an automatic belt in our layer house a few weeks after I left for college, not while I was part of the workforce helping gather those roughly 6,000 eggs per day, eh hem — but that’s a story for another day.
For today, my story is a reminder that life is unpredictable and that maintaining a spirit of flexibility and adaptability will serve us all better as we maneuver through each day.
It’s also one of encouragement not to give up when something doesn’t work out like we had planned. If we keep our eyes on Jesus and our hand on the plow, we’ll find our way through it.
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