PARTNER WITH THE WORLD [F, 7-4-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—PARTNER WITH THE WORLD [F, 7-4-25]

There are many different theories of how to deal with the imperfections of living in this world. We are told to bloom where you’re planted, or to make lemonade if life gives you lemons. Good approaches. Good skills.

Here’s a slightly different life skill: partnering with the world.

I’m thinking about that because it’s sweet corn time. That means Art Snider. I learned about world-partnering from Art’s sweet corn approach to life.

When Art retired, he decided to be a “truck gardener,” which sounds like growing trucks but is actually growing vegetables to take to farmers’ markets to sell out of the back of a truck. The problem was deer. There were a lot of them in the area where he lived, and they would eat all his produce as soon as it got almost ready for market. He thought about fencing, but it would take a lot of fence, which would eat into his profits, too, and create its own problems. So he planted a couple of rows of sweet corn all around his huge garden before he put in the other plants. The corn was up and ready for the deer by the time the other vegetables showed their heads. The deer were satisfied with the corn. They didn’t bother the other stuff.

That doesn’t work with the occasional rose bush. Shortly after our daughter, Katie, moved to Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, she planted a rose bush at the corner of her house. She went around the corner to get the watering hose. That took only a few seconds, but by the time she got back to the bush, a deer had run out of the woods—woods are everywhere in the UP, even in towns—and eaten her rose bush.

For the eight years that she and her family, and her parents, lived in Iron Mountain, we, like everyone else, had flowers only in hanging baskets on porches, where the deer could not get them.

Then Helen and I moved “…back home again, in Indiana.” No deer in a college town of 70,968, right? No, not right. Helen decided to get creative with her flowers. She put a pot of those pretty pink flowers--the ones for which I don’t know the name—outside our brick-walled patio so the neighbors could enjoy them, too. I hope the neighbors saw them quickly, for they were enjoyed almost immediately as a deer snack. So, Helen did not curse the deer. She understands. She brought the pot inside the patio. The flowers are pinkly blooming again.

Too often, if we don’t like the way life is, we just bulldoze it out of existence. We always pay a price for that, even if it is not immediately available. Far better to plant a row or two for the pests.

Life works best if we partner with the world.

John Robert McFarland

This being Independence Day, I think it especially meaningful that the lectionary Gospel for this Sunday, July 6, includes “I have given you authority…to overcome all the power of the enemy…” [Luke 10:19]