Dad

This coming Sunday is Father’s Day. Earlier this month was the anniversary of my dad’s passing. He’s been gone twenty years now and even as I write that I find it difficult to believe that it has been that long. I miss him.

Father’s Day coincides with the garden season and it is impossible for me to garden without thinking of my father. He was an amazing gardener. He loved it and he was good at it. I learned from him how to garden.

He wasn’t an agriculturalist. He was just an old fashioned gardener. An agriculturalist might instruct you to periodically loosen up the soil around the plant to allow oxygen into the soil which is vital to the root system. My dad never said that. But he did tell me that “plants like to be worked around.” I think I like his explanation better actually. Even as a young boy it just seemed so easy for me to receive and to understand this simple instruction, what some might call ‘folk wisdom’.

To all you dads out there, please take the time. I know that it might seem really difficult at times to be there but remember that you have one of the two most important jobs in the whole world.

When it was looking like rain this week I went out and took the little hoe that my mom gave me after my dad died. He always used this little hoe especially for this purpose because it is small and light and sharp and you can really work the soil with it. I worked the soil all around our tomatoes and peppers. They liked it.