Year after year my husband and I reap more harvest from our garden than we can possibly eat in the summer or put up for the winter. And year after year I ask him, "Why do you plant so much?" His answer is always the same. "Because I never know what will grow and what won't."
So every summer I find myself inundated with heaps of vegetables and barely a space in the refrigerator for a carton of yogurt. He goes to the garden in the morning and comes back with a bucket, sometimes two, full of produce - baby yellow squash picked at precisely the right moment for tenderness, shiny purple eggplant pretty enough for a picture and crunchy cucumbers of which I eat so many, I feel like I'm in a pickle, pardon the pathetic pun. We bag produce and give it to others who like fresh vegetables and don't grow their own.
Last summer my husband took some of our bounty to neighbors who live a few miles down the road. Mrs. B wasn't at home, my husband told me when he returned, but Mr. B seemed happy over the assortment of vegetables, particularly the cucumbers he said were "just right for dipping."
Several days after that, we received in the mail a handwritten thank you note from Mr. and Mrs. B expressing delight in the vegetables. A formal thank you was neither expected nor necessary, but I found much pleasure in reading the rather lengthy handwritten correspondence detailing how much they enjoyed our harvest.
Mr. B's note jarred the memory of another one I retrieved from the mailbox a couple of years ago. At pickin' time I had an appointment to which I arrived with produce in tow. The office workers at my destination were happy recipients. About a week after that, I received a note from one of them - not a simple thank you but again a handwritten account about how the man's wife had been so excited about the veggies, how she had cooked the squash to perfection and how much they enjoyed the fresh veggies.
Those two expressions of appreciation for such simple gestures seem uncharacteristic in a time when common courtesies are falling by the wayside. There have been times in the past when an expected thank you didn't materialize and I was disappointed. Then I turn around to find others who take the time to express big thanks for the most insignificant deed.
A heartfelt thank you that is a total surprise and completely unnecessary makes up for the ones never received. Along those same lines, a delicious homemade eggplant parmesan can totally negate the previous night's mysteriously tough okra, and a bountiful harvest can blur the memories of past summers when storms and drought claimed the harvest.
Life has a way of easing up at times and offsetting the lows and blows of the past. The tiniest kindness can help diminish the biggest calamity. Small pleasures help to balance all that we wanted and expected with what we actually ended up with, and sometimes when we're lucky, those same small pleasures can even afford us the luxury to forget all that is too painful to remember.
When my cup runneth over, I don't think about all the times that my cup was empty.