My Father’s Garden

I was nine years old when someone accidentally ruined my birthday party.

They had no idea they had done it. With a smile they said what seemed like a perfectly ordinary thing.

“Isn’t this exciting? It’s your last one-number birthday!”

Everyone else smiled.

I burst into tears.

Until that moment, growing older had simply meant another birthday. Another candle. Another year. But suddenly, I saw something I had never seen before.

If I kept getting older…one day I would die.

And if I was growing older…so were my parents. ; which meant they would die before me.

Then I thought about my brothers. My sister. My grandparents. One by one, it seemed everyone I loved most would disappear.

I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly live without them.

A darkness settled over me so suddenly it felt as though someone had pronounced doom over the whole world.

Why, I wondered, would anyone be born if this was how every story ended?

I ran upstairs to my room and cried.

A few moments later, I heard footsteps on the stairs.

The bedroom door opened, and my father peeked inside. He didn’t rush in or tell me everything would be all right. He simply came and sat beside me on the bed before gathering me into his lap.

“What has made my little girl so sad?”

Through my tears I wailed, “Why did I have to be born just to die? It isn’t fair! It doesn’t make any sense! Why do all the people I love have to die too?”

He held me close for a long moment before asking a question that seemed completely unrelated.

“Tell me…how much do you love chocolate?”

I looked up at him, completely bewildered.

Chocolate seemed like a very strange thing to talk about when the whole world had just fallen apart.

“So very much.”

He smiled.

“When someone gives you a box of chocolates, what do you do?”

“I show everyone.”

“And then?”

“I share them.”

“Why?”

I thought for a moment.

“I don’t know. Maybe because I want everyone else to be happy too.”

He nodded.

“Yes.”

Then he said something I have carried with me ever since.

“Love and joy must be shared. That is how they become true.”

He grew quiet for a moment.

“Your mother and I love each other very much. We couldn’t keep that love to ourselves. We wanted to share it. That’s why we have you and your brothers and your sister. You children are our delight.”

Then he glanced toward the vegetable garden outside the window.

“You know how much I love planting the garden with you children every spring?”

I smiled through my tears.

“Oh yes.”

“When we’re planting it, do we become sad because we know one day we’ll eat what grows there?”

I shook my head.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because we like watching it grow.”

He smiled.

“Exactly. We delight in watching it grow. And when winter comes?”

“It rests.”

“Does that mean the garden is gone?”

I thought for a moment.

“No. It just waits until spring.”

He smiled.

“Does it?”

I looked at him, puzzled.

“Or is the gardener still caring for it, even when you can’t see it?”

He let the question linger for a moment. Then he continued.

“He keeps tending it. He cares for it until spring returns.”

He looked back at me with such love in his eyes and touched my cheek.

“You children are our garden. We delight in watching you grow. One day our winter will come too. But winter has never been the end of a garden. It is simply its season of rest, and when spring comes, so do the gardens.”

He squeezed my hand.

“So it will be with us because love never truly dies.”

Then he smiled.

“Now, all those people downstairs came today because they love you. They came to celebrate you. They came to share in our delight. Would you like to come downstairs and let them?”

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It has been many years since that birthday. My father has had his winter now.

For years, I remembered that conversation every time spring returned. But not long ago, another thought found me in a deeper way.

The garden is not gone in winter.

As a little girl, I knew the flowers disappeared. I knew the vegetables were harvested. I knew the trees stood bare.

Somehow I had never really considered that the garden itself was still there.

Hidden.

Tended.

Waiting.

Then, almost as suddenly as the fear had come to me all those years before, another realization arrived.

Oh…

I’m like the garden.

I am my father’s garden.

Winter is not the absence of the gardener. It is one of the seasons of his care.

One day, my winter will come too.

But winter has never been the end of a garden.

Only spring reveals what the gardener has been tending all winter.

Now, whenever winter settles over the garden, I find myself smiling.

And every spring, I discover that my father was right.

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“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” —John 12:24

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©️ Gilda Wray. All rights reserved.