A friend of mine on Facebook asked the question, "Where has this year gone?!?"
Being considerably older than her, I answered in her comment section: "Fasten your seat belt, because every coming year seems to get a little shorter. It gets scary sometimes, like I'm on a runaway train."
I'm sure some of you know that feeling. And yet, we plan for the future in small ways. For instance, this year in August I came in the house from the garden, sat down to rest, grabbed my laptop and saw an email: Stark brothers were having a sale on a few things. I went to the site and saw there was a Sunshine Blue blueberry plant on sale; I like blueberries, and they don't have sharp stickers on them, so I ordered one. Later on, nearing September, they had an O'Neal blueberry plant with the price lowered, so I ordered that one too, because one little plant couldn't possibly give me very many berries.
Now here I sit in December, wondering why I wanted these plants, let alone the Golden Delicious apple tree I planted this summer. I will be 80 in July, and those blueberries won't bear for two or three years. The tree will take two to five years.
Even if I live to be a hundred, both my replacement knee and my natural knee are giving me more pain all the time. Will I even be able to garden next year? Or the next?
But I recall how ordering those plants made me happy at the time. I could almost taste them, looking at the pictures on that website. The fact that I bought them shows I have the hope that one day I might be eating delicious fruit; maybe that hope alone makes the cost worthwhile. And say, if I am going to have berries, why not order some red raspberries next year?
Hope is what keeps us going.
I'm still picking fruit off of trees planted by someone who has been dead for nearly 40 years. In my younger years, I picked buckets of fruit off of many trees planted by prior owners or generations. So the way I look at it, I'll keep planting until I'm dead and then whomever owns the ground they are on can look forward to a bountiful harvest.
ReplyDeleteThat's true.
DeleteSomeone will enjoy them and it could be you.
ReplyDeleteI love blueberries too, even just the idea of them! No matter how old we are, it's healthy to have a hopeful heart.
ReplyDeleteWell, you could go buy some of the fruits until your plantings give it to you directly! Linda in Kansas
ReplyDeleteYou can't buy golden delicious apples that are good because they are picked when they are green. I remember what a tree-ripened Golden Delicious apple used to taste like. Most all apples are picked too soon to ever have the taste they should have.
DeleteI think it's the optimist in you that's doing the ordering and planting.
ReplyDeleteThere is somewhere in the Bible where eternity has been placed in our heart. Oh, Ecclesiastes 3:11. I think that is partly what keeps us looking toward the future, no matter how old we get.
ReplyDeleteI love Ecclesiastes.
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