A Packet of Mixed Seeds

Go to the green house and plant a seed, I was told. Use it as a symbol of your writing goal this year. Seemed simple enough, but although other years I'd whipped out pages of New Year's resolutions, this year not one goal came to mind. What do you do when there is no end to work towards? Begin, I suppose and see where it leads.

Few seed packets remained, some cactus, which I knew could take years to germinate, and a plain white envelope marked mixed seeds. Curious, I opened it and found dried marigold petals and fine-as-dust seed that I knew to be portulacas. A third unidentified seed completed the mix.

As I found a pot and scooped up handfuls of soil an image flooded back to me of my father standing in the center of our front yard when I was, perhaps, twelve years old.

"You can't plant seeds that way," I told him. "You need to dig a hole and put them in one by one"

"says who?" he asked. "Not, Mother Nature!"

Our yard was split in two by the front steps, with the larger section Dad was working on about ten feet wide and eight feet from the house to the sidewalk. He'd dug up the soil, removed the stones, and raked it. His hands were still blistered from a fence he'd crafted the week before using dowls twisted into holes that he'd drilled into narrow strips of wood. Painted white, twelve inches high at the tallest, the dowls swooped up and down like a suspension bridge and formed a picketless fence for a lillipution garden.

How I loved that fence! To my amazement, day by day, tiny stems pushed up from the soil and crowded into each other, barely discernible leaves appeared and unfurled. Dad carefully watered each evening with the hose on the finest mist, but he refused to heed instructions and thin out the plants. Soon a low layer of green covered our little yard from corner to corner almost like moss until not a speck of dirt could be seen. The plants grew and thrived, clustered together, jostling for space like children in a playground. Buds formed and I held my breath waiting, until one morning our swatch of yard became a dazzling meadow of California poppies, marigolds and portulacas in red, yellow, pink, orange, and white.

That day, as I watched from inside, my friend Woodsy led his little brother up the hill and stopped when he came to my garden. He said something to Barry, then both boys sat down on the low concrete ledge and leaned over my dad's fence. Barry reached in with both hands and with the delicacy of a butterfly fingered leaves and petals and buried his blind face in the blossoms.

What do I expect from these writing seeds that I'm planting at Soul Food?

I expect to honor the memories of the past, to appreciate the joys of the present, to plunge into writing as I anticipate the mysteries of the future.

My past perfectionism has led only to lost opportunities. This year I'll fling words out into the wind and soil, and wait for them to take root and blaze into flaming color. Perhaps the garden I grow will emotionally feed or shelter someone. Or perhaps one who is blind will touch and sniff and finally be able to sense a little of my world's awesome beauty.