Now that's what I call growth

The first few days always hurt. Like getting used to riding a bike or the saddle on a horse. Your fingers and toes will ache with the memory of the day the first few nights. It will pass.

You will wear gloves but still find dirt deep beneath your nails, rich and dark.

You will fight with the weather as well as celebrate it. Each drop of rain can offer either a kiss of relief or a cold wet blanket of suffocating. You will try to predict this and you will get better at it, but you will always be a little at the mercy of the sky. Gamble anyway.

The seeds you sow will not always grow and the seedlings won’t always make it past a grasshopper's knee; even the ripest juicy tomato can be stolen from right under your nose by a backyard thief, a squirrel, a hornworm, the neighbors' terrible kids.

You do not do it for the end result. You do not do it to see every seed become a fruit. For you, there is no end, just seasons. And more growing to do.

Some seeds will grow and thrive and you will tend to them carefully throughout their life.

Others will be sickly and try your best, you will have to let them go.

Still others will be unruly, overzealous, and you will have to prune them and keep them in line.

All of them you will love.

You will dream of them in the winter and welcome them back in the spring. Their rhythm becomes your rhythm. THE rhythm really.

Over time it will bring you more comfort than you can really measure, you will often think of your grandmother. Hair wild as she hunched over a patch of arrant zucchini volunteers. You fondly remember being tasked with placing the extra squashes on the doorsteps of each of the neighbors. A joke amongst the tiny community in which you were raised and you were affectionatly known as the neighbor’s terrible kid.