Unpicked Gardens

By John Bach

While cutting grass today, I noticed our garden was loaded down with produce. To my surprise, hanging on the withering vines were plump red tomatoes, tons of green peppers and massive cucumbers. 

So what, right?

As I got closer to the garden boxes, I could also see piles of rotting vegetables that had over ripened and fallen to the soil. My mind immediately connected the sight to our current season — the cancer season. In a typical year, all those veggies would be piled in bowls on our kitchen island or would have been shared with friends and neighbors.

But not this year. This year, we found out Julie has breast cancer in mid-July, and she’s spent the last couple months in chemotherapy. So understandably picking the garden — normally an activity that brings joy —  fell to the bottom of the priority list.

I think back to the beautiful spring day this year when Julie and I planted those boxes. Cancer was the furthest thing from our minds. We were about to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, and it seemed the pandemic was finally coming to an end. 

Fast forward from that spring planting season to this fall harvest season, and it’s hard to believe how much her diagnosis has changed our lives. See, cancer isn't just the bad things that happen along the way, it is also the good things you miss during the journey. In business, they call it opportunity costs.
For us, the opportunity costs are the skipped Friday night football games, the missed bonfires with friends, the cancelled vacations and, yes, the fresh organic tomatoes that hit the ground to rot instead of getting sliced up for bacon and tomato sandwiches. 

The world doesn’t stop or slow down because of cancer or any other disease. And nor should it. Life and growth continue around you, and it must. The garden can’t wait for you to pick it,  and your kids can’t pause their lives for you to catch up.

My pastor likes to say that God never wastes a hurt. I take that to mean that someday we’ll look back on this season and we will have learned something profound about ourselves, our family or our marriage because of cancer. I hope that’s true.

As for the garden, all that produce that’s now breaking down in the dirt will be swallowed up by nature and replenish the soil for next year’s season. And though spring seems forever away right now, it’s still coming. And that means a new planting season isn’t that far off either.

You can bet we will be ready for the harvest, and we might even look back on this time as our growing season.

Though we lost a ton of produce this year, we salvaged a nice bowl from the garden today.