“My children saw you outdoors today and want to come and help you in the garden!” Those were the words I heard when I picked up the phone. I had just started shuffling my way up the ramp into the house with the aid of a rolling walker, something I was unable to do a week ago.
There is no way to turn down the “help” of a couple of small children at the best of times. This past autumn left me reeling from a couple of mini-strokes and a head injury, so I was already a little late planting some daffodils I had dug up in the summer. They would have bloomed late if I had kept to my plan of planting them right after Christmas, but a spontaneous bone break and resultant sprains hobbled my attempts.
Martin and Nora danced on over just about the time a chilly drizzle began to descend, but they came prepared with raincoats, boots, and smiles.
We found a few places to dig, with a few false starts when we realized we were cutting off the tops of plants just below the soil surface. Then the long-neglected daffodil bulbs were placed pointy side up, by tiny, willing hands.
The rain became a little more serious, but the children were even more serious. We had a bucket of “Sir Watkin” daffodils to put in, but the kids were warm and dry under their protective gear. The digging was slow, especially where the winter weeds had claimed the ground and matted it with a rooted carpet of green.
If I had been able to lean forward a little better on my broken ankle, I would have made a wider hole; but if these children had not offered their help, the bulbs would be drying out even further in the garage.
The pelting rain became stronger as I smilingly surveyed the tiny, shallow holes with the bulbs crowded in about as closely as they were when I dug them out so many months before. “Good enough! Thank you so much!” I proclaimed, as I dumped the last of the dirt from the bucket, along with the smaller bulbs, into the planting hole among the burgeoning weedpatch.
The fact is that they will live, if not thrive, to see a better year for daffodils. They may not even bloom after the combination of delayed planting and less-than-stellar planting conditions. That’s okay.
We go about our business stumbling and making all kinds of mistakes, sometimes even knowingly. The consequences leave us with not only feelings of regret, but sometimes downright failure.
Really, the only way I could have failed with these bulbs would have been NOT to have planted them at all. Yes, it would have been much better to have planted them in October, and to have spread them out in a proper hole at the right depth.
Sometimes we just have to choose survival. Emotional, spiritual, and psychological. There will be better days. If not here, then in eternity!
“You’ll need to pick some flowers to take home before you get out of this rain,” I said. Nora smiled up at me and replied, “I though you were going to say that!”
I corrected her, “You mean you were HOPING I would say that!” Her grin and nodding head confirmed my guess.
Let’s not let the perfect be an enemy of the good. As we strive to do the best we can, let us do it with the joy and enthusiasm of a small child.
“Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary” (Galatians 6:9, NASB).
And there will be flowers at the end.