Start with easy

You know how you wake up some mornings, the bad dream running laps in your brain, telling yourself it’s not real, but you carry the hangover of free-floating anxiety in your satchel of woes, which, most days, you can set in a corner, say, There, there, to the worries that do you no good to fret over?

For whatever reason you’ve shouldered them today, along with the persistent headache that points to something blooming outside that’s bugging you, so you go back to bed for a while, hoping that it will ease, that you might doze, awaken again feeling better, but no soap, so you lie there thinking, This is dumb.

You rise with a groan and make the bed so the cat can assume his usual place in your spot—or, more accurately, his spot that you’ve borrowed overnight—and while there is much to do—always much to do—you think, Start with easy, pulling on shorts and a lightweight T-shirt, adding your shades and, slipping into the flip-flops by the back door you keep there, tugging on the somewhat stuck door that swells in summer.

When you step into the sunshine, you feel a bit like Dorothy walking into Oz, blinking behind your shades, and because it’s a watering day, you pick up the magic wand, turn the spigot and presto! There’s the delicate shower of water that you aim at the leafy arms of the tomato overgrowing her wire cage like a too-small bra, a simile that makes you smile because the plant variety is, after all, named Juliet.

As you set aside the squirter and gently touch one of the reddest ovals, low to the ground, the first cluster to bud, it comes off easily in your hand, which lifts you somehow. And you cup another little gem, and another, and now you hold a trio of tomatoes, as if they were just waiting for you to show up, which you deposit in a small cardboard square box and take some photos, which you think is a bit silly—just tomatoes, for heaven’s sake.

But that’s the point: Holding a bit of heaven in hand that you grew from a sprout, even as you chuckle, thinking, All I did was plant her and water her, knowing that forces far greater than you shaped and continue to nurture Juliet—and you, for that matter—an everyday miracle that softens your old heart into once again loving this loveable life.

Juliet and her offspring / Photo: Jan Haag