Garden dreams bring hope for future

It must be winter as my mailbox is filling up with plant catalogs. The first one arrived the day after Christmas and every week thereafter has brought at least one or more of the enticing publications. The recent warm weather has caused me to envision my small garden filled with plants heavy with vegetables and awash with flowers.
Never mind that the space allotted for gardening is small. Never mind that over the years I have lost one bed to the shade of the trees that edge the yard and another to rambling raspberries. Never mind that the volunteer maple that I neglected to pull from the middle of the garden is now a gangly tree that casts an ever-widening shadow of its own. It is irrelevant that sometime during the heat of summer I lose interest and quit watering just when the plants need it most.
This year will be different. This year I will have enough peppers stashed in the freezer to last until next summer. This year the eggplant will not be spindly. This year the evil squirrels won’t chomp the tomato stems in half minutes after I go into the house. This year the plants will be more prolific than ever before.
I leaf through the catalogs and use a yellow highlighter to mark the ones I want. If I were to plant every seed, every seedling, every choice I have marked, there would not be room for a single blade of grass in the yard and my efforts would fill the empty lot behind us. Then I would have to commandeer a couple of extra spaces from the community garden. Even that might not hold all my dream plants.
Although I do shop from catalogs, most of what I buy comes from one nursery or another. The catalogs are mostly hopes and dreams, pictures of what could be.
They are also an escape from the dreary days of winter. Depictions of new varieties of tomatoes remind me that the mushy red globes found in the grocery store are a far cry from the juicy fruit that I remember from summers past. The products shown hold the promise of warmer days and tastier food.
In addition to escaping from the weather and planning for the future garden, plant catalogs are a welcome escape from the news. This year the news is full of stories about religious fanatics killing or attempting to kill those who don’t believe as they do. Somehow, killing is noble, while blasphemy is a reason for vengeance. If their intent was to silence the blasphemers, then they have failed on an epic scale. None of this makes sense to me, but then, violence almost never makes sense to me.
Therefore, I bury my nose in the bright pictures and try to decide if I can squeeze a couple of cherry trees into the landscape. I wrestle over whether to buy seeds or plants. Do I wait until spring when the seedlings pop up in the stores, or do I order the ones I want now? Do I choose this company or that one? So many possibilities, so many choices.
Then the Sunday newspaper comes. There, nestled among the coupons, is an image of a plant. It screams, “Buy me!” I resist. Then it speaks again, “Buy two! You know you want to.” I set the ad aside, mentally clearing a place for the insistent plants. Maybe I will give in, but later, not now.
Outside, the sky is white and flat. The air is chilly and the wind is cold. On the pages of the catalogs, the skies are blue and the plants are perfect. The newspapers and other media tell of new disasters, new tragedies. Floods, droughts, wars and injustices abound.
The catalogs hold hope; hope that the sun will shine and food will miraculously appear where a seed was planted; hope that not only will tomorrow come, but that it will be filled with beauty, life and the peace that comes with spending time with the flora that nourishes us all.