Grace in the Garden

A couple of months after the pandemic started, I drove a couple of miles down Fruitvale Avenue, determined to purchase my very first fruit tree. The mask that covered my mouth and nose seemed to silence my voice as I stood in line, six feet in front of and behind my neighbors at the local farm store. 

I didn’t know what I was doing with that Meyer lemon tree, and maybe, neither did some of the strangers around me, with the many seedlings and bags of compost and trowels they carried in their hands. Overwhelmed by collective grief and isolation, gardening was our something, our way of trying to write another, better story when everything felt like it’d been turned upside-down and shaken several times over. 

Soon enough, I hauled the two-foot-tall seedling home, determined to grow the sweetest and most floral of citrus fruits. It stayed in its original container for a couple of weeks before I deemed it needed more space and transplanted it to another, bigger container.  

But that other, bigger container didn’t seem to do the trick. Instead of producing tiny, white flowers and pinkie-sized green bulbs, as time went on, the flora began to drop off and fall to the ground; instead of growing and thriving and expanding, my little lemon tree was wilting, dying, withering. 

As the gardeners among us might suspect, I eventually realized the tree had become waterlogged. When my exuberance to overwater met a self-watering container that refused to drain, the Citrus x meyeri began to drown. Perhaps I need not tell you that by the time I transplanted it a second time, and moved across town to entirely different environs soon after, the lemon tree had had enough of all my shenanigans. 

“What do I do?” I lamented to a new neighbor I’d gotten to know, a man who seemed to know a lot more about growing things in a garden than I did. 

“Yeah, I don’t know,” he said, shoulders shrugging toward the periwinkle sky. “Dig a hole, throw in some compost, and see if it helps to plant it in the ground?” His suggestion more a question than an answer, I doubted his theory would work, let alone produce the sweet fruit I desperately craved. 

A year went by, and then, two. When tiny citrus bulbs emerged the third spring, they held onto to the branches and didn’t fall to the ground, as had happened in previous years. Instead, a handful of green bulbs began to grow and expand and plump into real, actual Meyer lemons to use in baking or slice into a glass of water. 

Now, two years later, the lemon tree has given us an abundance of fruit, enough to stock the fruit drawer and share with our neighbors. But she’s also reminded me of another way forward and of learning to tell another, better story. 

I think of the parable about a man working in a vineyard. When a fig tree is found without fruit, wasting good ground and space, the homeowner goes to the gardener, anxious to chop it down. But the gardener points him in another direction. 

He dares him let the fig tree be for just one more year. Dig up the soil and sprinkle some manure around it; give the tree just a little more time, because maybe that’s what it needs. 

One commentator writes that this is a parable of generous grace: “God is at work in the world and in our lives, extends to us the gift of grace. Like this tree, we are often given multiple opportunities to do better, to be better, or to do the right thing.” Likewise, another writer muses that this is a passage about learning to ask other, better questions. 

Instead of asking why, Debie Thomas notes, “start over. Ask a better question. Go deeper, be braver, draw closer. Repent,which means, change your mind. Turn around. Head in a different direction.”

Today, when I walk into the backyard and look at the Meyer lemon tree, I think of the story she’s given me, that I now tell you – one that dares me, and maybe you too, hold a tale that is both generous and alive, forgiving and rebounding, even now. 

As one gatherer recently noted, so many of us find ourselves in another time of massive, unacknowledged grief. With all that is happening in our world, and for many Americans, in our country too, what does it mean to start over and try something new for a change? 

Even when it feels like all is lost and no chance of fruit remains, still we are invited to go deeper, be braver, and draw closer.  

So we dig a hole, throw in some compost, and see if it helps to plant it in the ground. 

Because maybe it will.