Gardening of a Different Kind

“Make a list of the jobs you’d like some help with and I will give you four days over Easter to get as many as possible done”. What a gift!

It wasn’t hard to think of them. If I can chip away at something and do it myself, I will, but there are some jobs that I just don’t have the muscle power or height or whatever for. So, an offer like this is pure gold to me. A real love gift, because I am pretty sure that even though he really enjoys what I create in our garden, if he was left to himself he would find other ways to occupy himself on a precious long weekend off work.

True to his word, he gave me four days. We put up curtain rails in the studio and then hung the curtains. Neighbour’s hedges were trimmed and mulched. Piles of sods left over from previous excavations were removed.The list was long and with each one completed I felt such a joy to finally cross these things off my ‘to-do’ list. #grateful

On day four as we began to clean up from all our activities, he stopped and said, ” Why don’t you go and pick some flowers for inside before the rain comes. I’ll do the clean up.” Wow! What a gem of a guy! #grateful again!

I’ve looked at those flowers on the dining room table all week and seen, not just their beauty, but, also, someone’s very thoughtful gift to me. They’ve reminded me of the fun time we had doing four days of cleanup projects together. The being outside in the sun, stopping for a cuppa, dump runs… together. The laughter, conversations, building memories. They let me feel the love all over again.

“Let us be grateful to people

who make us happy; they are

the charming gardeners who

make our souls blossom.” Marcel Proust (1871-1922) French Novelist

Writing this in appreciation of his wonderful gift to me, it makes me stop and think about how I have the responsibility and joy to be the ‘charming gardener’ who make his soul blossom as well. What parts of ‘me’ would make him happy? Am I sharing them? Am I giving gifts of love? And not just to him but to all the people in my world. Loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself, is what the whole law and commandments are about, right?!

It’s good to take a stocktake every now and again. Are their new gifts I could give? Things I could do? If I want my fruit trees to blossom big I need to feed and water them big. Little feeding gets little blossom… sad, but true. But when the blossom comes we ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ as we appreciate their beauty and have all the feels of satisfaction for our efforts. We do it because we like that kind of fruit and so we chose and planted it. We entered into a relationship with that fruit tree. The ‘hard work’ is now just beginning. Now we need to tend it. It’s the tending that gives us the fruit we desire.

So, I am off to have a cuppa and do a little pondering. I want to feel the fruit of love in my relationships. See what I need to add to my ‘to-do’ list, that he so kindly emptied for me. It’s just gardening of a different kind. 🙂