out of the ashes

I will tell our kids

abundance can and will rise

out of the ashes.

This is my garden (yes, that's the famous chicken coop in the background.) You can't see it in this snapshot, but there are raised vegetables plots to the right and some really awesome fruit trees to the left. This year, everything has been almost embarrassingly abundant. We've collected bundles of flowers, baskets and baskets of snap peas and plums, apricots and squashes of every description ... berries galore ... and so many tomatoes even I can't figure out what to do with them all.

Yep, it's been a banner summer for produce.

The kicker is, last summer was a dud. Flowers never bloomed; the trees grudgingly dropped a few measly fruits before closing up shop way too early in the season, and the vegetables all seemed to suffer from the malaise my old baby-raising books always identified as "failure to thrive." The fact that I, like most mothers, would blame myself if my infant failed to be fat and happy is not lost on me as I make the comparison to my garden. Last year I was convinced I must have done something horribly wrong to thus wither my vines.

But the truth in both cases isn't anywhere near so clear-cut. Plants and children are affected by myriad factors, many beyond the control of even the most careful of guardians. Last year, for example, a raging brushfire - the third in as many years in our lovely little piece of the Central Coast - dumped what looked like truckloads of ash on our neighborhood, which tho' spared the actual flames that crept up to the end of our street and tragically destroyed the houses of so many of our friends didn't (thank goodness) burn our home to the ground.

That ash had some caustic power of its own, though, and by coating the tender leaves and buds of my plants at a crucial point in the growing season, it pretty much nuked any chance those plants could do more than survive; in fact, the summer of '09 saw some of my favorite perennials lose the fight and die, despite all the care I could give.

The plants that did struggle through were rewarded - thanks to that same ash, now worked into the soil as a powerful nutient, abundant rainfall, and two unexpected heat waves during the following winter. Late last spring the garden in my backyard burst out anew. The aformentioned bumper crop of flowers, fruits, and vegetables has given this summer a luster of success I could never have imagined a year ago.

That's life.

One year ago my family's constellation was blown apart by personal tragedy - the kind that wakes you up with a midnight call from a police station and keeps you awake through days and weeks of unwanted outreach from reporters and the morbidly curious. There were times my own grief - and other emotions still too fragile to mention - rendered me incapable of anything more than basic survival. I know my siblings, my husband, my father and even worse all of our children were also damaged by this. There were times I questioned our individual and joint survival.

But here we are. Love and faith and the sheer demands of life - the peremptory will to live on in spite of the rain of deadly ash and worse - kept us somehow together and, somehow, I think, even improved. More attuned to the ways of others. Less preoccupied with the unimportant.

Willing to forgive.

Our family's garden is scarred and blooming.

We thrive - in spite of and perhaps even in some cases because of - the damage inflicted upon our roots and stems by powers beyond our control.

Without knowing what the future holds, I am comforted by a new understanding of nature's course, and I will make sure our children do as well, in all the harvests to come.