Sowing Across the Rows: Essay and Poetry

by Mckenzie Hunt

SOWING ACROSS THE ROWS

There was nothing in my childhood quite so rhythmic, so familiar as a Tuesday morning. Early, before the sun had time to rise above the cedar trees in our front yard, to the click of my mother’s low-heeled boots, I would follow her out to the car. Heedless to the speed limit, we wound down the lazy country roads. Ours was always the first car in the parking lot. Our steps the first to echo into the quiet cool of the church. And, finding our way into the little room tucked behind the fellowship hall, long before the women came for Bible study, we would work, side by side, emptying out the “Return” box in the church library.

I can remember the sound of my mother stamping books, the smell of her lilac perfume filling the small room, and the vivid green of her three-quarter sleeve—the one worn by my sister now. But the best part of the morning was after she locked up the library, after the Bibles were closed, all the ladies filed out the front door, and Mom and I would slip into jeans and our dirt-worn Merrills. The brown ones we both had in the same size and would mix up sometimes. Our tidy outfits tucked in the car, we’d haul buckets or shovels out to the garden plot she’d plowed between the church parking lot and the county highway. And, between the rows of would-be snap peas and—my favorite—zucchinis, she’d tell me about the study from the day. I’d recount some funny phrase a kid in the nursery had said. Sometimes, we worked in silence. It was often like that with her, side by side, in the quiet of the work and each other’s company.

My mother was a master gardener. In my memory of her, everything she touched flourished and grew green—from the curtains of Tradescantia that hung in our kitchen windows to her rose bushes and peony beds out back, from her raised-bed rows of herbs to her church vegetable patch. In the summer, our yard was a riot of blooms. Purple cone flowers towered over magenta phlox, coral gladiolus swayed among sunshine daylilies. Fuchsia petunias lay in friendly rows of terracotta pots on the deck, and, always, our house was hemmed in by hostas on all sides.

For my mother, the year was marked by the rhythms of growth: bulb season and the time to start indoor seeds; the last frost and the first thaw; mulching days and, finally, that trip to the greenhouse to bring home a swath of pansies and other hearty harbingers of warmer weeks to come. Then, before you knew it, it was May, and we were out in the garden most days. Mom, digging with a spade or scattering her carefully collected compost to fertilize the soil, then pointing out the shapes of the invasive leaves she called “thugs” for me to weed.

In the garden, my mother was a queen in her kingdom, and I was her glad courtier. The work appealed to me. Yes, there was the dirt embedded under your nails, the sweat of yanking up roots, the backache after an afternoon bent over tender shoots. But as a child, instinctively, I knew that the heart of garden work is anything but mere manual labor. Not when you are side by side with your mother and she lets you pick out seed packets of your very own root vegetables and annuals to fill the rows, to plant like tiny kernels of anticipation for what will come of them—the outrageous sunflower bouquets or, one memorable year, our prize “zucchini baby” that bore weeks of zucchini bread, zucchini pancakes, even zucchini Pad Thai.

There is something about garden work that is brimming with play, bursting with delight—with all the things that captivate the imagination of a child. The suspense of watching for green shoots, measuring their growth morning by morning, then running out to the backyard early one August dawn to spy your first sunflower bloom.

As a girl, my summer peaked in late July, when, after weeks of checking their ever-darkening buds, the raspberries were ripe. Their harvest was entirely my domain. And I exulted in it. Thrilled at the first trip with the empty pail, running barefoot to the backyard to pick and pick, bending low, reaching high on my tiptoes, even braving thorns to lean deep into the bush to retrieve those ruby red jewels. As many as I picked, I ate. Until my fingers were stained crimson and my bucket brimmed with juicy spoils to adorn pancakes for family breakfast or—at my special request—enlist Mom to make her raspberry scones.

My mother seemed to know something about the natural delight a child could find in being appointed ownership over the soil. Being entrusted with selecting the desired vegetable or flower variety, weeding the alloted plot, digging earthy wombs for those tiny magic seeds. Then, being the one responsible for watering and weeding the beloved row where your one-day pumpkins or dinnerplate dahlias would grow. My mother knew about a child’s heart rising to the occasion of entrusted stewardship. Of being given a measure of autonomy to create and cultivate growth—to bring it to life, then rejoice in its fruits. And all the while presiding, with her own patient expertise, over the process, always ready to dig into the dirt beside me, or, gently, again, remind me of the difference between petunia stems and bindweed.

Those years of summer afternoons in my mother’s garden are some of my dearest memories of her, of her distinctive, and now bygone, industrious grace. But what’s more, they have also built the imaginative architecture of my vision of God—of my relationship to him and to the manifold work I carry out in his garden-world. Because I have come to see that all the work God has for us in this life is like the rhythms of my mother’s steadfast husbandry. Is garden-work—entrusted to us by a patient Master-Gardener who could easily do it all himself, but loves to spend his summer afternoons sowing across the rows from us, teaching us the love of the soil as we go.

Yes, what if our work in this world was at once that playful and vital? As sweat-laden and blithe as a late July afternoon, laughing with your mother over how huge the zucchinis had grown? What if, like the planting season with my mother, it unfolded in a slow but steady-growing intimacy with our Co-gardener and with the soil? As he shares more and more of his garden-dreams with us—he lets us in, bit by bit, on his master plan for the plot. And gives us two small rows of our own to tend to. Which are our lives, our souls, our small entrustment—our parenting or painting, our doctoring or neighboring—all of our callings springing up alongside each other like the jumble of mixed-up seeds I threw into my raised bed last spring. Zinnias hovering over lemon thyme, intertwined with pansy blooms.

All along, it has been his soil. His sun and rain that come to cause its growth. His plot that has been growing from forever past and is already brimming with his seedling dreams for eternity. Which is a garden in full bloom—a veritable merism of fecundity that will show Eden to be but the acorn to the oak tree of its one-day flourishing, when the whole joint heavens and earth will grow into all it was intended to be. Will bloom in a riot of unimaginable hues, will spring forth unhindered by thorns or weeds. The day when he himself will be our light and will walk with us in the cool of an eternity-long golden hour.

Yes, we are bound for the Garden restored. And, far from making us “of no earthly good,” this heavenly lens vivifies our work in the soil of this earth. First, it reveals our telos—the aim of our lives. We work the garden to be near our Gardener. In this life as the next, the telos is the same: keeping glad company with Christ. And second, it gives us unfaltering hope as we carry out our work in this world. Because the fulfillment of God’s garden dreams is inexorable, as irrefutable as his own character. Heaven and earth will be married and made new. Creation will be “set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). And we shall indeed “go out in joy and be led forth in peace,” as surely as “the mountains and hills will burst into song, and the trees of the field will clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12).

And if that is our certain future, if the garden is bound to be restored and we ourselves to inhabit it, then all our work here, when it is working the ground of his kingdom, cannot fail. Cannot return empty, but must “accomplish that which [he] purpose(s)” (Isaiah 55:11). For it is caught up in the soil of the everlasting Eden, the planting of eternity.

GARDEN DREAMS

I think you are—

beyond hope and nearly beyond belief—

what I always hoped to believe you to be:

the Figure from my stubborn garden dreams,

the glad persistent husbandry.

The hands that with tender exaction

slipped all those hints and glints

through the gate into the core of me;

a summons in each throb and ache to press my eyes

to the break in the vines—

and there, in briefest glimpses, see

the hospitable heart of reality.

Summed up and laid bare in all that quiet greenery,

your identity disarmed me—

Then clothed me again in mercy.

MCKENZIE HUNT

Mckenzie Hunt is a mom, writer, and music therapist who prefers to be outside, relishing “the feast of creation.” From a young age, she has kept a daily practice of journaling where she has found space on the page to wrestle with God, befriend grief, and vivify her imagination for spiritual realities. She writes to invite and equip readers to faithfully steward their souls—the sacred soil she believes God has given each of us to keep, and the place where he meets with us.

You can find Mckenzie on Instagram @mckenzie.elizabeth.hunt or on her Substack Mckenziehunt.substack.com.