In winter, gardeners can grow impatient for their favorite season to commence. Like the ice-hard ground outside their windows, they’re off duty, which goes against a gardener’s very nature. Gardeners are all about things stirring and quickening, not least of all themselves.
As soon as the days lengthen sufficiently, a gardener kneels right down in damp soil with a rattly paper seed packet in one hand and a trowel in the other. If the temperature is right, unlikely-looking wrinkled seeds go about their business, launching roots one way and stem the other, becoming a well-anchored platform from which first leaves rise tilting toward the sun.
The gardener, of course, will be looking on, watering and weeding and tucking compost in where needed. Weeks later, blossoms draw the bees, shaking their golden dust upon them, and later still, small fruits swell and brighten into ripeness. A gardener encourages friends and loved ones to check the aroma and then bite and taste. Maybe an older gardener notices a little of the juices at the corner of an astonished grandchild’s mouth. A grandparent gardener needs no snapshot to remember that.
That’s another trait of gardeners — they notice and know all sorts of things. They focus especially on worthwhile and beautiful things, and on how to make them come to pass. They keep personal and planetary quickening in mind all winter long. They memorize the date when the Open sign first swings on its nail at the commercial greenhouse, and they’re in earnest to begin. Let’s face it, in spring a gardener can be annoyingly energetic.
We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that a particular gardener is also a teacher. Surely teachers and gardeners are kindred spirits, walking similar paths of hope and commitment. Like gardeners, by late spring teachers too may have seen something promising take root in the minds and hearts of students.
But unlike gardeners, by April teachers have already been working for many months. And when the last bell rings on the last day of school — I remember this so well — dozens of students roar down the stairs and out the doors. A good number of these promising young people a teacher may never see again. What will come of this year’s teaching and learning? Year after year, the full fruiting of a year’s labor takes place after the Closed sign goes up, out of the teacher’s sight . . . if it takes place at all. Who knows?
Every year a gardener composes a bright and scented landscape in partnership with the earth, witnessing all its ups and downs from start to finish. A teacher isn’t as fortunate as a gardener. Sometimes, a former student visits a beloved teacher, true, or they run into each other shopping in the produce aisle. But most days it’s okay not to know. A person who’s ripe to be a teacher likely has a rattly packet of trust and hope seeded in the heart. Not knowing what young people will make of their education in the long run is a teacher’s lot. After all is said and done, making something worthwhile of what we’ve handed down to them is their responsibility. I hope we told them.
Music: "Wrong Foot Forward" by Flook
