KEEPING A PROMISE!

How many times have you promised to do something?  Have you kept that promise?

I don't really know that I have promised too many people anything - not in a real promise way - you know not with the words - "I promise You".  I don't really think we do that anymore in our busy lives... at least not verbally.

I made a promise last summer to my Dad.  We were having a conversation over the phone about gardening - one of many.

If you knew my Dad you knew how much he loved his vegetable gardens.  It kind of was something his whole family believed in and enjoyed doing.  When I was a kid we had a small vegetable garden in the back yard, but he also rented a large garden plot on the outskirts of the city to grow even a larger garden.  He loved his vegetable garden -the larger the better.

One of the things he was so excited for me on our move to the country was that I would have a vegetable garden - a large one!  He immediately started coaching me in the right way to plant.  He was a believer in the Farmer's Almanac, and always planted his gardens by the moon cycle charts in that little book - must be something to it - because his gardens always produced high yields of everything!

In this particular conversation I was telling him about my rose gardens, and how troublesome I was finding the task of keeping quack out of that particular garden.  He wasn't interested really - so I asked him why he never got into flower gardening as much as vegetables.  I know a lot of men who loved to have gardens of both.

His words... "The only flower worth planting is the Sweet Pea.  I used to plant them all the time, years ago."

Have you ever had a few words just zap you back to another time and place?  Zap - his words had me standing in my parents backyard watching my father tying string onto an old white wooden picket fence.  I can see it as plain as the day it happened... and then I could see his sweet peas - and I could smell them!  I was maybe 6 yrs old.

I told him I remembered his sweet peas when I was small, but couldn't remember them in the later years.  That's when he told me he quit planting them because of me.  I was allergic to so many plants as a child, his sweet peas were on that list - so he quit planting them.

Well that made me sad... so I made him a promise.  I said I would plant some next spring just for him, and send lots of good pictures to him when they bloomed.

Dad didn't make it to this spring.  I can't send him pictures of his sweet peas, but I did make a promise, so I'm going to keep it.

But like everything in the garden - there is a process...


Stay tuned!