The Bottom of the Heap

Spring is taking its sweet, slow time making new plants, new leaves, new plans.  The lawn grass is all very, very green now.  The trees are heavy with promised leaves, although no leaves showing yet.  The older, wiser trees are still in their winter drabs.  Snowdrifts have melted, leaving behind the detritus of winter.  Trash, old leaves, piles of mud and gravel.  Nasty looking, really.  The wind in Wyoming blows so strongly that any hope of fall yard clean up providing a clean slate for spring gardening is picked up by a gale and dropped elsewhere.  Probably Omaha.

It's a true pleasure though to watch the struggle of tiny blades of wheat grass try and push their way through the fallen over, matted, weighed down, thigh high grasses of last fall.  Eventually they will prevail, bloom, ripen and be the grass that falls over under the weight of snow banks.  Sometimes the baby plants will seek a beam of sunshine seeping through a crack in the sludge weighing them down and take a sideways path into the light.  They get there.  They grow and mature, but their roots are never as strong and sturdy as the plant that struggled longer and grew straight up to the sunshine.  If the sideways plant is knocked over, often you will find a long, undernourished stem, pale from lack of sun, and too weak to hold a plant up straight.  There also those that just can't seem to make their way from the bottom of the heap.  They slowly suffocate and die.

My quest for a answer to the age-old question "what do I want to be when I grow up?" seems elusive on the best days, and completely unanswerable on the worst.  I have had a tendency to follow the easy path, always bearing in mind that sometime in the future I could be a mighty oak.  Or at least a beautiful flowering wisteria. I had a mighty oak in mind in my youth.  I chose a different path than the developing perennial.  I had children, helped them mature, and kept my acorn buried deep.  Now that I have to bring my life out of the heap and into the sun, I am having a hard time finding the acorn, let alone the oak.  My tendency has been to seek the quick way to the sunshine, the easy path that has some familiarity on the way.  I must have grown sideways.  I accepted a job in the arena I was most familiar with, not even considering for a moment that this job was the bottom of the heap.  I struggled, plastered on my cheery face, volunteered for extra hours, put in time, and yet, I never quite made it off the bottom.  Not enough nourishment or sunshine or water. And an annual at that.  I would have to make the same struggle each season.  I got knocked down fairly fast.  When confronted with my mistakes, I felt true regret and shame for the errors I made.  The humiliation of the long list of petty complaints waged against me in addition to my confessed mistakes truly emphasized to me that this was never going to be an oak tree.  It was a pale zygote under a huge heap of trash, rotting leaves, sludge and the previous green of seasons prior.  If I am to grow, I must struggle through the detritus of my life, push straight up, although the path will be more difficult, and seek my sun in another way.  Be it a mighty oak, a stately spruce or a beautiful flowering wisteria, the perennial retains its previous growth and becomes stronger and better with each season.

Life is too precious to volunteer for the bottom of the heap.