Maybe This Year

I could be wrong, but it just seems like by this time last year, and the year before that, and every year of my life actually, I have questioned the sanity of my ancestors who made their homes in this miserable Missouri weather. It’s the kind of heat where poking your head through the back sliding glass door is synonymous to hovering your face over the 450 degree oven when you open it. Same mascara-melting, botox effect. This is the month where you humanely pull the plug on all the poor little flowers you’ve been trying to milk back to health for the last two months. This is the month where the birds stop chirping. Where they just sit in the branches and miserably breathe--but not too deeply, lest they burst into chicken strips.  

But not this year. This is the year I learned my lesson and chose not to skewer $200 on my lawn. This is the year I surrendered my pattern of failed love affairs with things meant to grow green with rich bursts of leathery purple and felt magenta blooms. And of course, this would be the first year of my life where it rains three times a week in July and August, when the nights require sweaters and the daytime highs are in the eighties. The birds are still chirping their love songs, turkeys are strutting, and the weeds posing as my lawn need mowed every five days. If only I had tried for one more year.

This reminds me of a story of a gardener who pleas for a little more time of tending to the life of a fruitless fruit tree. He continues to bide time and hold out hope. Maybe this will be the year when a little extra-special gift from the atmosphere woos something contrary and bland and ordinary into feeling rather special. When a little whisper from the Wind lures the blooms to peek from creases in the branches, blinking in surprise of itself in the gentle sunshine. Maybe this will be the year when the living water flows through the veins of new fruit and the wings of the birds dance wildly in sugary delight.

Maybe this will be the year that death takes respite. That the baby will come. That the church will grow. That the thread of new light will glimmer in marriage. That the depression will break open and a sprout of life will poke through. That the letter will come. That the writhing head of addiction will rest. That the light of new love will dawn. That the earth will stop crumbling beneath our feet, that the cracking and indebting will be filled and sealed and healed with the soothing leak in the cloud of financial woes. Maybe this is the year to hang on. Maybe the universe has something in store for us yet.