Letting The Plants Grow

The gardeners come on Monday mornings, usually around 11 A.M. I try to put the food out for the birds and squirrels long before then, so they have ample time to eat before the roar of lawnmowers scares them away. I’ve been doing that for a few years now. Bags of bird food with sunflower seeds and other seeds. Put out peanuts, pecans, walnuts for the squirrels. I give them water too… and while I have the hose… I water some of the plants and grass in the yard.

I live in an apartment, so it’s not like it’s my yard… but I’ve been here a while and it has sort of become my thing. My neighbors all talk to me and comment on it… neighbors in my building… and neighbors in the building next to us.

When little plants and weeds grow around in certain areas, especially by the big tree where all the animals hang out, the gardeners trim them. So, whatever grows in the dirt next to the tree… it never gets too big. Each Monday it gets trimmed.

Memorial Day came… that was on a Monday… so the gardeners were off and didn’t come. The plants that grew in the spot next to the tree weren’t trimmed. So, they grew bigger and bigger… by the time the next Monday came by… I can’t be sure, but I think the gardeners left them alone because they were so big. They sort of looked like someone intentionally planted something there. Each Monday came and passed and they didn’t trim the plants in that spot. They started getting really big.

I wondered what they were going to be. I had my theories… one was that they would be sunflowers. I do put sunflower seeds out there after all. Sometimes I even hand feed them to the squirrels… only the ones comfortable enough with me to eat from my hand.

Pepe will always eat from my hand. Whether it’s peanuts or sunflower seeds or whatever. Not almonds, she doesn’t eat almonds.

So, the plants kept growing. Most of my neighbors who saw them enjoyed them and said they wondered what they would become too. A couple of my neighbors commented in more negative ways.

“Aren’t they supposed to trim them?”

“I really wish they would trim those weeds.”

That second one was the particularly funny one to me. I find it funny when people will use certain words to show their disgust. Weeds. Like they were these horrendous things. Additionally, I don’t know that we can even say they are weeds. Do we know that for a fact? Are they not just plants? The second funny part about this… was that this was a neighbor in a different building. So, my neighbor really wished they’d trim the weeds in our yard… not her yard.

You know… focus on your own yard. Right? You don’t need to worry about ours.

I further explained, I think they were turning into flowers. I said I thought they might be sunflowers. She said she wasn’t sure about that. They had tiny little yellow flowers on the side and they didn’t look like sunflowers to her. But I pointed out… they do have little yellow flowers on them… so they’re pretty nice.

She stayed firm on her, “wish they’d trim your weeds” and I stayed firm on, “they look nice.” And it was a moot point anyway. The gardeners weren’t trimming them. And none of us were going to.

Another Monday passed and the weeds were bigger. And really looking like they were becoming flowers.

And then another Monday arrived… and everyone could tell… these are sunflowers. Huge and beautiful sunflowers.

Admittedly, I didn’t really know where I was going when I wrote this. This was just something that happened… and when I thought of it in its entirety… it made me want to write about it. Maybe it’s just a little story. Or maybe there’s a variety of lessons here. Perhaps, giving something time to bloom and not designating it “a weed” before it has had time to do anything is in our best interest. Perhaps, it's a lesson in kindness. You give and you receive. I just feed the animals because I like to, and I know they’re hungry. But in feeding them, the sunflower seeds fell and planted themselves naturally, apparently, and all my watering of the yard helped them to grow. It wasn’t planned. But now we all have some beautiful sunflowers to look at.

Or maybe it’s just nature and we don’t need to read too much into it. Beautiful things sprout from the ground on occasion… if we let them.

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