July 28, 2025
It’s a yearly miracle. We put seeds in dirt, put water on the dirt, watch the sun shine down on it all, and eventually plants grow, and then those plants fruit, and we harvest and eat and preserve so we can keep eating into the dark of winter. There are flowers, too — tall, short, fat, thin, every color you can imagine. There are bees, hummingbirds, and one bad chicken who keeps digging in the lettuce bed.
There is a toddler with hair like cotton fluff who knows how to raid the strawberry patch and the grapevines and the cherry tomatoes, and as of this morning, she likes to take her scissors to the garden and cut fresh flowers for the house. I have a fifteen-foot section of volunteer yarrow this year, and it needs some pruning, so I let her have at it.
In the arugula patch, she picks a salad with me and says, “One leaf at a time. One leaf at a time."
Yes, little one.
One thing at a time.
One thing at a time.
