A Garden, A Kitchen, A Heaven, A Hell

There was a knock at the door, when I was worrying.

There’s so much to worry about just now. The restaurant had cut Michael’s hours for a few weeks, since they don’t do much business in July in a college town, which meant the checking account was grumpy with us. The news out of Washington every day continues to be grim, and the local news isn’t very nice either. I was also worried that I’d go to hell. I am still suffering from religious trauma and I suppose I always will. When I worry about everything else, I also worry that I’m going to hell. That’s just what I think about on a daily basis, for at least an hour or two: money, politics, climate change, World War Three, going to hell. The knock came during my daily hour of worry.

I knew that knock. I greeted Jimmy’s boy by name before I’d even opened the door all the way. He was standing on the porch, petting the cat, clad in nothing but shorts because it was the hottest of July days.

“Can I see the garden?” he asked.

I snapped into action at once. “Yes, and then you’d better help me make zucchini bread before all the squash in my kitchen rots!”

We ran around back to the garden, where summer was summering just as hard as it could.

The biggest zucchini plant was spent, flopped dramatically over when all the leaves had been standing up a day ago. But the other three zucchini were still producing, and the yellow summer squash I bought at the last minute was only just beginning to flower. The pumpkins had taken over the world, as pumpkins do: vines covering the walkway, vines covering the bolted lettuce, vines snaking through the spent strawberries and burying what was left of the dying pea plants. There was even a vine growing up the porch, as if a pumpkin had decided to become a grape. Corn shot up on the north side of the garden, showing off tassels. The paste tomatoes that I planted first were heavy with hard green fruit. The heirloom tomatoes I planted ten days later were covered in their first blossoms. Towering above me were the sunflowers, bursting out bloom after bloom.

I went to get the hose to give the whole world a good soak. Jimmy’s boy followed, laughing when I turned around and accidentally sprayed him, laughing as I sprayed him on purpose this time, laughing harder when I turned the hose on myself. Surely this was what Heaven felt like. Surely, Heaven was the place where water was abundant and the plants always grew better than expected. Surely, God the Father was a kind and loving Father, because He made water fall out of the sky, and He made people who figured out how to make the water run through pipes underground. Such a world could not be anything but good.

“We’re going to make so much sauce this year,” I exalted, as we wound up the hose and hung it on the neighbors’ fence. “I’ll have to bag it up and store it in my freezer for winter. When those tomatoes start getting red, we won’t even know what to do with them all. But today is a day for zucchini bread.”

Jimmy’s boy found one more zucchini, that I’d missed in all of the fun: a great big squash thicker than my pudgy arm. He carried it in to join the pile of squash on the kitchen counter.

“That one’s about the size of a bat!” I joked as Adrienne came in to investigate.

Jimmy’s boy swung the deep green bludgeon menacingly, nearly bonking Adrienne with it. “In the old days, if you lived on a farm, you could chase away robbers with zucchini!”

We laughed as I showed him how to cut the stem and butt off of the squash with the big knife. Jimmy’s boy is more meticulous with tools than any child I’ve ever met. I’d trust him with a chainsaw if I had one. With the knife, he delicately chopped the stems off. I peeled the skin off the very thickest zucchini so it wouldn’t be leathery. He grated them against the cheese grater, creating a mountain of mint-colored snow.

There were just enough squash for a double batch of sweet cinnamon muffins, and another double batch of savory cheese bread, without any left over to put away or throw out.

Surely, this too was Heaven. Heaven couldn’t be anything but the place where you always have enough. Surely God was the most loving of Fathers, loving enough to make living things come out of the dead earth so that I could harvest them and teach little children to cook.

“Now, I’ll set aside enough muffins for your family, and enough muffins for the Baker Street Irregulars down the street,” I said. “And you can have half a loaf of the cheese bread as well. Adrienne, did you give the cat her dinner?”

“That cat loves you!” said Jimmy’s boy.

“Yes, because we rescued her.”

“Rescue?” repeated Jimmy’s boy. He’s learned a lot of words from Sunday School lately, and he likes to try them out on me. “You rescued the cat? You saved her from hell?”

I thought for a moment about that odd definition of the word “rescue.”

“Well… I did save her from the Artful Dodgers’ house.”

Now Jimmy’s boy looked sad. “Oh. Yeah, that was hell.”

It had been several weeks since they left, and I’d nearly forgotten to worry about the Dodgers. The anxiety gripped my chest again, and I was sad. Surely hell is where nobody loves or cares about children or other helpless beings, and that was the Dodgers’ house indeed.

Surely Heaven is where somebody is always making sure that children are safe and happy, and maybe that can be my house.

I measured and stirred as Jimmy’s boy cracked eggs and fetched ingredients. He told me about school and how glad he was to be moving up to the first grade, how anxious he was about bullies, how he wished he could go on a field trip to someplace more interesting than the middle school band concert. I promised to take him to Pittsburgh to see the dinosaur museum just as soon as I had the money to renew my membership. He asked if I’d go to someplace called “the science store” and get him some arts and crafts kits to play with when he next came to visit. I promised to pick up some surprises for him the next time we got paid.

Jimmy’s boy had to leave when it was getting dark, before the muffins were quite done– after making me promise to bring him his share in the morning. I assured him there’d be plenty to go around.

Surely Heaven is where there’s plenty to go around.

Surely Heaven can’t be far from here, because I’m happy for the first time in my life.

Heaven must be what happens when you’re busy with your neighbors.

Just for a moment, I understood.