THE DREAM GARDEN

A GARDNER'S DREAM...

AND TIME ...THE EVER- ROLLING STREAM

Monday, 8:45 AM.  57 degrees F, up from 52 earlier.  Wind SW, calm to light. The sky is beginning to cloud up and it is quite hazy, the sun now partially obscured.  The humidity is still low at 54%, but the barometer, now at 30.04", is beginning to trend down.   Rain is predicted by this afternoon, and it feels like it.
  A very large vegetable garden, all beautifully fenced and gated, was built a few years ago right on Highway Thirteen in the back yard of a home on the north end of Washburn.  I watched with interest as it was laid out,  trees cut down to allow adequate sunlight, sturdy wooden posts erected,  wire fencing and gates added...and finally the garden planted.  I had witnessed someone's garden emerge from dream to reality.
   I am not sure what the gardner's intent was exactly, but from the size of the garden and a frame next to the fence obviously meant to hold a sign, I suspect it was to sell fresh garden produce at the roadside.  A small dream by some measures,  perhaps, but far more noble than many others.
  So imagine my dismay when, last summer, I noticed the garden going to weeds, and as the tomatoes  ripened they were left unpicked, to rot on the vine; and the sweet corn  left to the crows and raccoons.
   What had happened to the gardner? Obviously something dire.  Illness?  Divorce?  Death?  I watched in vain to see someone I could ask, as I did not want to go to the door and seem to be prying.
   Then one day last week I saw a man loading wire tomato towers into a truck and I did stop to ask what had happened to the gardner.
  "Oh, he died suddenly, last summer."
  "The property is being sold at Sheriff's Auction today."
  "I bought the tomato towers from his widow."
   As he talked, I thought of my own father and his dreams; first of a farm that he and his brother lost during the Great Depression, and then of his purchasing land for a nursery thirty years later with the intent of being an independent businessman.  He no sooner had the venture well started than he died, at 57 years of age, quite young by todays standards.
   I have now lived twenty years longer than did he.  If I were to meet him today, as I sometimes do in my dreams, I would be the old man, and he the young.
   We are fortunate indeed if we live to realize our dreams, and it is perhaps tragic when we do not.
   But the greater tragedy is never to have dreamed at all.

OH GOD, OUR HELP IN AGES PAST

 (the old Episcopal hymn, 7th stanza)

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

                                                        Bears all its sons away;

                                                        They fly, forgotten, as a dream

                                                        Dies at the op’ning day.

Lyrics by William Croft, 1719