Kids and Contextual Theology

My wife and kids are staying with my wife’s family in Wisconsin for the week while I attend a summer school intensive 8 hours a day.  After class yesterday I went for a long run, and as I climbed the hill approaching the seminary apartments I was pleased to find a number of children careening down the slip-and-slide and splashing in the miniature kiddie-pool.  My head was pounding with dehydration and sweat dripped from my chin, so I knelt next to 3 yr old Timmy and his older brother Calvin and I asked,

“I’m hot, should I go stick my head in the sprinkler?”

Calvin shook his head in approval, then a few moments later, after a silent pause in which Timothy seemed to ponder the question with utter seriousness, he looked up at me and said enthusiastically, as if a great idea had just occurred to him,

“I think you should go stick your head in the sprinkler.”

Well okay, Timmy, that settles it.

After soaking my head in the cool water that poured over the slip-and-slide, I walked back toward Timmy and noticed Kenneth, my 7 yr old neighbor, sitting on a towel in the grass.  Kenneth was wearing a winter stocking cap.  It was 87 degrees and sunny.

“Kenneth, why are you wearing a stocking cap?” I asked.

“I am wearing a stocking cap so that mine hair doesn’t get wet.  Because if mine hair gets wet, the water might drip down into mine mouth and then I might drink it.  And if mine hair gets wet it might drip into mine eyes, too, and it will hurt mine eyes.  That’s why I’m wearing a stocking cap, so that mine hair doesn’t get wet on the slip-and-slide.  But I don’t always wear a stocking cap, only when it’s the slip-and-slide.”

Good enough for me.

So after spending 8 hours a day talking about redemptive-trajectory hermeneutics, or the relentless contextuality of interpretation, or the interplay between cross-communal dialogue and communal self-reflection, I get to come home and have conversations like this.  And it keeps me from thinking I’m more important than I really am, or taking myself too seriously, or feeling I need to maintain a certain level of pretense and sophistication.

Kenneth and Timmy don’t care about my theology or my ability to articulate myself.  They care if I can relate to them while they run through the grass carrying sticks like sabers.  And my two-year-old doesn’t care what sort of hermeneutic I hold to; she wants me to sit by her while she does a puzzle and run underneath her while I push her in the swing.

That doesn’t mean theology is unimportant; in fact, it informs the way I treat my kids and those in my community.  But if doing theology becomes an end in itself instead of a means toward greater worship and service and relationships with my neighbors, then I’m in big trouble.

My current course has challenged us to consider who really cares about our theological discourse.  If the only ones who are going to give a crap about your latest project are you and the professor who will read your paper, or your fellow Ph.D. candidates, or the faculty in your department, then we are missing the point.

Theology ought to serve the Church, and the Church is made up of people writing dissertations, and single mothers who must choose between groceries and rent, and kids like Timmy and Kenneth.  Our theology ought to take that into account.

I’m grateful for this contextual theology course, and for my family and community at the seminary, and for the youth in south Minneapolis who come to our church, for reminding me who and what theology is for.

A Thought on the Sacraments

Joos van Cleve (Dutch artist, 1485-1540), detail "The Last Supper," oil on wood" (c. 1530)

I’ve been doing some thinking about the Sacraments lately.  The Body and Blood.  The Water.  This past quarter in seminary I had to form some personal theological statements about the Sacraments – about what I believe and why.  It was challenging and formational and significant for me.  I guess that’s part of what seminary is all about.

In its most basic and traditional definition, a Sacrament is a visible means of an invisible grace; something we can experience with our senses that carries with it the gracious work of God.  There are various nuances and interpretations of what this means and what these are, but the most universally accepted Sacraments are the Lord’s Supper and Baptism:  The Church’s tangible experiences of God’s grace.

The Anabaptist John Howard Yoder offers another helpful definition, arguing that the Sacraments are those activities of the Church for which God has said, “When you act, I act.”  There are certain things the worshipping community does that are both symbol and source of the activity of God; and when we do them, God is there.  In this sense the Church must continually worship and celebrate the Sacraments in order to participate in the work of God.

And in a similar sense, the Church’s life must also be sacramental in Her ministry to the world.  The Church itself is the visible means of God’s grace to the world.  In other words, just as the worshipping community knows and experiences God through the nourishment of bread and wine, the world will begin to know and experience God when the Church feeds the hungry and clothes the naked.  The Church is established in the grace of God and thus She can convey that grace to the world for which Christ died.

Here’s an excerpt from something I wrote to my brother as we discussed these thoughts:

The church’s activity in the social sphere is only sacramental if it is rooted and grounded in the Grace of God, i.e. the Sacraments.  Thus, the Church does not do social feeding ministries just because food is good, but because God graciously gave Himself up for us, and was broken on our behalf, and will one day feed the world at the Great Banquet.  The Sacraments make sure that our table fellowship is rooted in the Lord’s Table.  And we do not make friends with people who are different from us because diversity is good, but diversity is good because we have all been baptized into our death and raised with Christ and we are all the family of God, Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female.  It is the Sacrament that makes that real, and not the other way around.

That about sums up my view of the Sacraments.

But then I recently finished Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (yes, I have a break from class for a while so I am back to reading novels), and I am reminded of another aspect of the Sacraments – the place where the mystical presence of God meets the flesh and blood of our world.  In Greene’s novel, the character Sarah struggles with her disbelief in God, and after looking at an image of Christ on the Cross she thinks:

“So today I looked at that material body on that material cross, and I wondered, how could the world have nailed a vapour there?  A vapour of course felt no pain and no pleasure…

…Suppose God did exist, suppose he was a body like that, what’s wrong in believing that his body existed as much as mine? Could anybody love him or hate him if he hadn’t got a body? I can’t love a vapour…”

The Sacraments make sure we never forget that God isn’t just a vapour, and God’s work in us isn’t merely an idea.  The bread sticks to our tongue and our teeth bump the metal cup… and we swallow something that is real. We hold our breath and fall into the water and feel the cold and the wet and the darkness all over our bodies.  And it’s real.

Jesus is real and we don’t worship merely a vapour.  The bread and the wine may not be Jesus in full, but they affect and involve our physical senses the same way Jesus affected his disciples – reclining beside them at the table with smelly hair and hot breath.  And we experience Jesus now at the Table as a foretaste to our experience with him when he returns, when we will touch and feel him like a friend.

What I’ve Been Up To

For those few of you who may have been wondering why I haven’t added anything new for a while, I’ll post a few pictures of what I’ve been up to lately.

I was still in class all the way into the first week of June, and then my family escaped to Colorado to visit my parents and dedicate our two babies.  My wife’s folks and her younger sister also met up with us for a few days — here are some of the highlights:

Caitlyn and her parents and younger sister on the left; my grandmothers, parents, and lil' sister on the right; our children in our arms

playing around in Estes Park

the thunderstorm sky in Rocky Mountain National Park

a family portrait (even our two-month-old in the stroller behind us) at the alluvial fan

our families enjoying steak dinner on the deck of the cabin

All the above photos (other than the one on the deck) were taken by Caroline (pictured directly below).  She has a a skill for photography and our family has taken full advantage of it, obtaining beautiful pictures for little more than the occasional frozen pizza or cherry pepsi that Caroline might request when she visits.  It’s a pretty good deal, thanks Caroline.

And thanks to my family, both Bangs and Belchers, for a great week of vacation out west.

My blog activity should pick up soon as I have a break from class and won’t be chasing hail storms through the Rocky Mountains any more this summer.

Caitlyn's younger sister holding her niece (my daughter)

Life from the Land

My brother posted this interesting quote from J.R.R. Tolkein, reflecting on the relationship between fantasy and the pre-industrial era.  My blog hasn’t tackled those same issues, but the quote actually gets at some of what I’ve been trying to say in the gardening posts.

[Family life must have been different] in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense real (not metaphorical) connections between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air and later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardized international diet…are artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.

Let’s reacquaint ourselves with some of that strength.

Why We Garden, Part IV: Special Spaces

There’s a place at Grandma and Grandpa’s house where everything is always good.  Up the hill behind the kitchen window the woods are cleared and the sun hangs out all day above a little crest of earth where Grandpa used to pull tomatoes.  This June marks six years since he last turned a shovel in that ground, yet still, in the middle of the overgrown grass and twisted thickets is a small wooden sign proudly announcing “Grandpa’s Garden.”

Grandpa’s Garden has always held a sort of magic for me.  Before we lived in Minnesota my family used to vacation at their little house in the woods, and while Grandpa would be up there yanking weeds I’d be chasing garter snakes at a safe distance or catching the leopard frogs that sprung from the grass as I ran by.  Once, when it was just him and me, he picked a tomato and I followed him back to the kitchen where he sliced it and put it between pieces of toast and melted cheese.  I received that sandwich from Grandpa like a child at his first Communion – goodness and grace from the ground he’d toiled over.  The woods and rivers surrounding their house are full of all sorts of mystery and adventure, but that bright garden atop the hill is a special place, alive with critters and sunshine and images of Grandpa before he passed.

I often work night shifts patrolling our relatively quiet campus, and last week, during our third consecutive night of rain, I walked up to the garden with my powerful Maglite and studied the ground in its darkness.  I was in a place not used to visitors at that hour, and it felt like I was intruding on some mysterious secret, like a child walking downstairs late at night for a glass of water only to find his parents playing cards and drinking wine with strangers.  And there in the dark, with the rain falling sternly, the garden seemed to possess its own urgency.  In the daytime when the sun is bright the humans come with their watering cans and shovels and they poke around as best as they know how, but here in the darkness the earth and the rain seemed to be getting some real work done.  And the worms! Oh the worms! Wherever the light fell, the giant, swollen nightcrawlers slurped back into the dirt as if I’d just burst in on them changing underwear or toweling off after a shower; and there were hundreds of them, some as thick as fingers and others like spaghetti, working the soil as only worms can.

The more time I spend around gardens the more I appreciate them for their energy and beauty.  Whether it’s the wisps of steam curling from the giant compost piles at Growing Power or the way Grandpa’s hilltop feels warm even in the frozen January sunshine, gardens are fascinating and full of life.  Yesterday morning, as we enjoyed our first seventy-degree day in several weeks, a fellow seminary gardener commented in wonder at my impressive sunflower seedlings, “It’s amazing how dirt and sunshine can somehow take these little seeds and turn them into plants taller than you or me.”  And then, as I mixed rich compost at the base of my young tomato plants I marveled about how weeks previous this dirt was nothing more than the eggshells and coffee grounds I’d discarded after breakfast.  What wisdom and strength the earth must possess!

About the Triune God the Nicene Creed reads:

We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible…

 

And in one Lord Jesus Christ… by whom all things were made…

 

And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life…

 

Those last words strike me – The Giver of Life.

The life-giving work of the Spirit can be perceived in various ways, but I can’t help but sense that the same Spirit that gave life to Grandpa as he shouted from his pulpit is the same Spirit that gives life to Aleah as she drops her granola bar in the dirt…and it’s the same Spirit giving life in a garden where the soil and sun make strawberries so sweet you can hardly stand it.  All of creation hangs on the life-giving breath of God.

Gardens are special places.  Some of Jesus’ last moments before his Passion were in a garden, his sweat turning to blood as he anticipated his death.  And Grandpa’s sweat dripped upon his garden as often as his wheezing chest and failing heart would let him six years ago.  And now, in my family’s corner plot of the seminary community garden, I can spy on worms as they soak in the midnight rain or listen as the stems seem to stretch and straighten in the morning sun, or kneel next to my wife while our necks turn red and sweat darkens our shirts.

Gardening isn’t always profound.  It doesn’t always remind me of Grandpa or witness to the Spirit’s work in creation.  Sometimes it’s nothing but blisters and ambitious bugs.  But spend enough time in a garden and you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about.  Gardens are fascinating, and if bright vegetables and stunning flowers aren’t enough to keep you interested, consider gardening simply for the fact that something amazing is going on in there.  You’ll see.

 

I wanna fit in to the perfect space,

feel natural and safe in a volatile place.

And I wanna grow old without the pain,

give my body back to the earth and not complain.

–The Avett Brothers, The Perfect Space

Bethel Blackface

This happened last week at my alma mater.

It’s too bad.

It’s too bad a group of seniors who will be graduating from  Bethel in a week were oblivious as to why blackface is not okay.

It’s too bad the majority of the student body doesn’t understand that even if racism isn’t intentional, it’s still racism.

It’s too bad that some white students at Bethel have argued, “I wouldn’t be offended if a black person painted their face white in a comedy skit so why should they be bothered?”

It’s too bad that nearly a week after the incident a number of people haven’t even thought to ask their fellow black students what is blackface and why is it so offensive? Instead, we sit around and laugh about how easily some people let their feelings get hurt.

It’s too bad we think just because we don’t personally dislike black people it means our hands are completely clean of racism and we aren’t responsible for any indirect, corporate, or structural injustice that may occur.

We can do better than this.

Why We Garden, Part 3: Responsibility

Back when there was no such thing as the green movement, the food justice movement, or the organic movement, people gardened.  Before the industrial revolution and the rise of urban societies there was almost nobody who didn’t garden in some form or another; and in our recent history, most of our grandparents or great grandparents gardened to survive the World Wars and the Depression.  People have gardened in various ways and for various reasons since the beginning of time.  We are not entrepreneurs, pioneers or trailblazers.  We stand last in a long line of people who have held rakes and picked dirt from their fingernails throughout history.

But in another sense, people who garden nowadays actually are pioneers.  The reality is, there’s no reason we have to garden.  Most of us can drive to our local grocer and find anything we want at a reasonable price — we can survive quite well without ever having to put our hand to the plow.  So people who do choose to garden today do so for reasons other than sustenance and survival.  This series of posts has reflected on some of these motivations, but the “movements” mentioned at the beginning of this post reflect a different kind of motivation, motivations that aren’t primarily personal or recreational but draw from the social, economic, and environmental implications of a homegrown onion.

The danger of writing a post about the different movements that inspire gardeners is that we risk classifying those who garden and those who do not as either concerned or unconcerned with the various issues, but this oversimplifies the matter.  There are plenty of people who garden diligently but think the green movement is something led by Kermit the frog or crazy Irish people.  And there are people deeply concerned with environmental justice issues who do not garden because of certain practical limitations.  So this post is not about advancing a certain agenda or aligning gardeners politically, and it’s not supposed to be a slap on the back to gardeners and a slap in the face to non-gardeners, but it is about highlighting some of the benefits of gardening that you may or may not have been aware of when you first started digging holes.

Environmental Concerns – One of the growing motivations for gardening these days is that it offers an alternative to some of the environmentally harmful practices associated with major food production.  The first environmental issue often raised involves the distance your food has to travel to get to you.  The produce in your grocery store was probably grown thousands of miles from where you live, which means trucks and ships loaded with oil, emitting greenhouse gasses, were used to bring you your carrot.  Also, the further you are from your food source the less likely you are to concern yourself with the sustainability of the farming procedures.  If the forest next to your kids’ teeter-totter is burned down for a big factory farm that sprays pesticides, you might raise an eyebrow, but when it happens in a country across the Gulf we don’t offer it much thought. Thus, many people have taken up gardening because they don’t want to rely on major grocery stores that draw from large-scale food producers; and instead of eating a tomato that took I-75 up from Florida, they’ll settle for the one that made the walk with them from the backyard.

Social Concerns- A few months ago a friend and I road-tripped to Milwaukee for an Avett Brother’s concert, and before we drove to the concert hall we stopped at a community gardening headquarters called Growing Power. There’s a lot that could be written about our time there, but one of the simplest lessons I learned is that gardening in urban settings is about far more than environmentalism and the green movement, it’s about health and justice for people living in low-income, urban neighborhoods.  Here’s the gist of it:

Major supermarket grocery stores, by and large, cannot survive in low-income neighborhoods because the residents do not have the excess cash or savings to purchase large quantities of groceries at one time.  They cannot go to the supermarket and fill a cart with food for the week, which is exactly what supermarkets are designed for.  So instead, low-income neighborhoods are littered with corner stores, fast-food restaurants, and mini-marts that offer cheap, high calorie processed food that can be bought in small quantities over and over again.  The result is, of course, extremely unhealthy diets for low-income residents.  The concept of a community garden, then, is to provide access to affordable healthy food for the people of these neighborhoods.  Community gardens are often organized and subsidized by a non-profit organization, but are worked by the people of the neighborhoods, and everyone gets to eat fresh vegetables at the end of the day.

Even beyond urban community gardening, the social benefits of gardening are significant.  Whenever someone gardens their own produce, shops at a farmer’s market, or buys from a local grower, he or she ensures that the person who worked the land and picked your pepper receives a fair wage for their effort.  The same cannot be said for most large factory farms that hire workers who may or may not be legal citizens and may or may not earn a livable wage.  As nice as it is to enjoy a ripe tomato in the middle of December for a price that doesn’t make us return our kids’ Christmas toys, part of the reason we can do this is because someone else didn’t get paid much to pull that tomato.  Gardening is one way to avoid relying on that type of production.

Economic Advantages– This last discussion is probably the most universal in its appeal:  Gardening can save you some money.  Well, this is not entirely honest.  Gardening may save you money, but it will cost you time and energy, energy that could have been used making money doing something like delivering pizzas or mowing lawns (Yes, these are awesome ways to make that extra cash you need for baseball cards and firecrackers).  Anyway, the obvious point is that when I collect a bucketful of strawberries at the end of June, this means I don’t have to go buy strawberries for my wife’s inevitable pie – an annual symbol of summer.  More homegrown veggies means less money spent at the grocery store, less trips to the supermarket for those carrots we swore were still in the back of the fridge, and less money spent eating at restaurants because, of course, homegrown veggies and good ol’ home-cooking make a friendly pair.  There is nothing profound about this.  If you are tired of spending so much on groceries or at mediocre restaurants, start gardening.

(pie image borrowed from here, city image taken from Growing Power)

Why We Garden, Part 2: Family Stuff

It didn’t take Caitlyn and me long to figure out that our oldest daughter can only spend a few consecutive hours indoors before she starts climbing the walls or diving off the back of the couch.  She doesn’t really self-entertain and gets frustrated when constrained to our two-bedroom apartment.  With my busy class and work schedule, Caitlyn and I rarely get much hang-out time, thus it doesn’t do us a lot of good to sit around in the apartment while Aleah dances on the coffee table with marker on her face and play-do in her hair, insisting we feed the birds again…”Seeeeeds, mo seeeeds!”

We can go to the playground or push the strollers down the path, but perhaps the most rewarding activities for Caitlyn and me have come as we sweat beside each other in the garden while Aleah follows us around adding worms to her bucket or pouring dirt over the tops of weeds.  We need to be outside and we need to be together and my wife needs delicious, handpicked strawberries.  So, naturally, we need to garden.

Since marriage (and family) is, in some sense, a life-long commitment to shared purpose and interdependence, gardening is one of those microcosms where this relationship is really incarnated.  As is often the case, it would be easy for our marriage to become an echo of  June and Ward’s nifty little black and white utopia where I go off to seminary and Cait puts on her apron and coddles the kids while a hot-dish bubbles in the oven.  I don’t mean to caricature those families where this is the model or imply that this doesn’t reflect interdependence in some way, but it just wouldn’t work for Caitlyn and me.  We need to be beside each other, working together in situations where we can hear the other’s voice and knock elbows as we crouch in the dirt.  I think most couples find their own ways to make that connection, and for Cait and me, gardening is a big one.

So, for our little family, gardening is both a family activity that keeps our 22 month-old from carving her initials in the window screens, and a means for my wife and me to participate in each other’s lives in a productive and rewarding way.

One last thing: Something I’ve noticed about bloggers, myself included, is that we tend to present our lives as far more interesting or cute than they actually are.  So, in an effort to prevent that, I need to be clear that not every little family excursion to the garden is all that rewarding.  Just the other day Caitlyn and I both became flustered and tense while trying to plant our final seeds because Aleah was sitting in the dirt balling her head off.  She had only lasted about ten minutes before growing bored and tired, so we spent the next several minutes alternating between getting some actual work done and trying to amuse her with meaningless tasks.  I gave her the hose and a sprinkle can to fill with water, but after only a few minutes her jeans were soaked and the boogers pouring from her nose were glittered with dirt.  Defeated, I carried her inside and left Cait to finish planting the Oregano.  It wasn’t our best day.

But gardening is still awesome.

The Brood Parasite

We had a new bird at the feeder today, a Brown-headed Cowbird; the male looks mostly like a blackbird but with a glossy brown head.  After looking it up in the bird book we found that this bird is one of only a few species in North America known as a “brood parasite,” meaning they actually lay their eggs in the nests of other species who then foster the young Cowbirds – often at the expense of their own young.  Just think, any Brown-headed Cowbird you see was abandoned by its parents and raised by a species not its own.

I don’t know whether I’m appalled or impressed.

In other bird news…for the first time in the two years we’ve lived at the seminary we had an Osprey land in the man-made Osprey perch along our lakeshore.  This impressive raptor sat in the morning sun for a few minutes and then took off with a wingspan rivaling that of a Great Blue Heron.  It was cool.

The Sowers Went Out to Sow

I haven’t posted in about a week, mostly because any spare time I’ve had has been spent up at the garden with my family, and as of today we are completely planted and awaiting growth!  It has been an unusually warm spring in the Twin Cities as we have had an entire month of 60+ degree weather with overnight lows consistently in the 40’s.  There is still a slight risk of a frost, but if nature is going to offer us a longer growing season we’d be fools not to take it.

All this to say, I have decided to try a bit of theme-posting, and since gardening is the deed of the day, I am going to devote several posts to the topic.  Thus, over the next several days I’ll share a series of reflections on why, in just two years of marriage, Caitlyn and my thumbs have turned an earthy green.

Why We Garden, Part 1: The Sun and the Seasons

Two months ago 18 inches of snow smothered the earth outside our apartment, layers of ice and crust and powder collecting since early December, forcing the land into unconsciousness through the steel-dark months of winter.  Today we spread compost over freshly planted seeds and then watched as the sprinkler twisted back and forth across our little plot of land, soaking our precocious strawberries and turning our soil into a squishy mess beneath the warm April sun.  Anyone who lives in a place with distinct seasons can appreciate these transitions, but gardening serves to heighten the anticipation and satisfaction carried along by each of the earth’s wild moods.

My brother-in-law is from southern California and sees no problem with “75 and sunny” day after day (Forgive me, Daryl, for using you as a foil.  I’ve watched enough idyllic snowstorms with you in the Belcher living room to know you appreciate some variety in the weather.)  He, like many from such climates, asks, “Who would ever want to live anywhere different?”  The answer is, of course, “Me!”  I don’t want to live where the weather never changes and the land always wears the same outfit and I don’t need seven kinds of jackets and three types of boots.  I want winter to be deep and treacherous, spring to be sloppy and sweet, summer to be so hot you have to swim ten feet down to find the cool water, and autumn to be serious and kind, full of apples and orange leaves.  I want the seasons.

I’ve always thought the seasons bear witness to something old and wise  – like a great tradition passed along from giant oaks to little saplings pushing their way through piles of leaves.  Anyone who has spent any significant time in the upper Midwest knows that we are at the mercy of a force far heftier than we can really handle.  Toys left in the yard in late

Grandma's flooded backyard

November can disappear overnight and not be found until after Easter, next to that rake and those gloves that never made it back to the shed; and about the time we can finally see the grass we have to go fill sandbags at the local high school or help Grandma hook up her water pump because the rivers have overeaten again.

So, as the opening paragraph suggests, gardening is one of those things that calls attention to the seasons.  After winter has run its course and the land can breath once more, we get to start arguing about the best mix of lettuce and if the tomatoes will do better next to the peppers or the garlic.  We watch the weather as the overnight lows gradually climb out of the twenties and we wait for the day that the frost goes out from the ground and the earth can start really drinking once more, like someone with an old, bad habit.  And then, when the excitement of planting, weeding, and watering has worn off, those first little lumps of color start forming beneath the leaves and we are once again inspired by the prospect of cherry tomatoes so sweet you can eat them like M&Ms.

I’ve always appreciated the seasons, enjoying each one for its different activities and fascinations, but with gardening it’s different.  The weather and the land aren’t just things to be entertained by but things to listen and respond to — our ability to eat a nice homemade salad on the porch in August depends on it.  And our passage through time isn’t determined by the numbers on the calendar but by the size and color of the fruit and the threat of a first frost.  I remember last year my summer didn’t end with the beginning of classes or a Labor Day barbecue, but with the numbness of my fingers as I pulled our carrots from the ground on a chili September night.  I filled the bucket with carrots covered in dark frigid mud, and then, because the water at the garden faucet had already been shut off for the year, I lugged them into my apartment and knelt beside the bathtub to rinse our last harvest of the year.  I waved goodbye to summer with sore knees and cold hands, and summer bid me adieu with a bowl of blaze-orange carrots.

I get frustrated when I hear people in Minnesota complain about the horrible winters and mucky springs.  I think if you can’t enjoy each season for what it has to offer then that’s your fault and not the weather’s.  Admittedly, I used to enjoy winter far more than spring and I loathed the day the piles of snow turned to lumps of dirt and ice, but gardening has served to fill that gap between winter’s furious excitement and summer’s easy satisfaction.  I now look forward to those muddy months and embrace the early stages of planning and preparation necessary for a juicy, delicious harvest.  And as we stand out in the April sun while water splashes across our burgeoning soil, the ice and crust that held us captive just months previous seems easily forgivable.

So if you too live in a place with surly seasons and haven’t quite figured out how to enjoy yourself, consider gardening.