There are people who will tend your garden when you aren’t looking. The many details we miss–ignore–as we run through our busy days. There is a careful, sneaky labor in cleaning up a garden not your own. The hopeful assertion, having noticed a need, of hands in the dirt. I was hoping to stomp out all those weeds myself, but they persisted, had been choking my flowers, my walkway.

A garden needs all sorts of care. Maybe we pull the weeds, maybe we have help, maybe they come back anyway. Sometimes we use medicine. Vinegar for the walkway, even though it stinks. Sometimes the rain helps, sometimes we need to water. Maybe someone simply sings to the flowers, asks them to grow. All these gentle hands and hearts together make a garden flourish. I can never keep up when I try to tend it all alone.

How willfull! How presumptuous my loved ones have been in taking care of things when I wasn’t looking! I catch them dirt-handed, less guilty than humbly satisfied with themselves. I cannot deny the benefits they’ve done my roots. How gorgeous my garden now, absent my family but singing their songs.

There is nothing like being loved so well as this. At the end of summer, tended to, still in bloom.