I got that joy, joy, joy, joy!

I don't know how it is where you are, but it's been crazy hot here lately. I think today I'll take one of our eggs up to the road and crack it open and see if it's hot enough to cook it. Just for the fun of it. I'm getting desperate...

Our chickens are sadly hilarious, walking around with their beaks open wide and their wings outspread. I'm thinking of giving them a bath, but that may not end well.

No rain in the last three weeks means the hose and I are spending way too much time together....dragging it around like a dead carcass, muttering what I wouldn't give for an irrigation system.

And the flower containers I joyously spent the springtime filling? Their cries for help send me scurrying outside into a wall of heat at least twice a day, moving them from place to place, hoping to hit on the right combination of sun and shade in an effort to keep them from giving up the ghost, and me from losing my sanity.

But what's a person to do?

When you're just not seeing it

Recently, I found a treasure at a used bookstore...Soul Gardening: Cultivating the Good Life.

It's one of those books that calls my heart and soul to "come and dine".

Today the author shared about the first time he planted a seed...and it took me back...

To when I was a child, holding my first seed...rolling it around between my fingers...wondering how something so small could ever grow to look like the flower on the seed packet.

I remember the scene so well...the noble rock behind me, which seemed so big at the time. The field of grass spread before me. And a little hole in the ground that I had grand dreams for.

I think it was a Hibiscus....because I remember thinking if I grew enough of them, I could make a necklace.

All I know is that the packet promised that if I put that seed into the ground, out would come this HUGE BRILLIANT flower.

It took my breath away.

So, with the faith of a child, I planted it, placing it gently in the hole and covering it...patting it like a small kitten, content that I would soon experience a miracle.

Day after day after day I ran to my rock and sat on it, staring intently at the site, believing with all my heart that my flower was going to poke up from the ground, any second now.  

But it never, ever came.

I remember standing there, feeling betrayed...wondering what I had done wrong. It was supposed to be so different.

I returned to that site many times over the next year...always expectant. Always hoping. Even in the snow of winter.