We Always Replant

This is how gardening works in Wyoming. This is how hope works everywhere.

Yesterday, my love asked me to explain our world and I couldn't find the right words. She was feeling the pull of hopelessness and I was without the right thing to say.  

Twelve hours later here is what I wish I would have said: 

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In Wyoming, being a gardener requires enduring constant heartbreak. We pour every particle of ourselves into a garden to fill it with life, color and nourishment - only to watch it be torn to shreds by one of our common and violent afternoon hailstorms. 

Hail in Wyoming is a special kind of semi-frozen sadist. It comes down pre-sharpened and ready to destroy our labors of love.  It rains down like a hundred-thousand razor blades of flower-chewing fury. 

When the storm passes, and the hail ceases its sociopathic assault, we come out of our homes to investigate what was left of our garden.  We drop to our knees pick through the pieces of what is left - which is, usually very little.

We curse. 
We blame. 
We lament. 
We grieve. 

Then... 

we replant. 

We always replant. 

This is the most important part, 
my love, 

WE ALWAYS REPLANT.

We rebuild our garden with tears in our eyes. 
We replant our garden with lumps in our throats. 
We get back to work. 
We fight for life and color. 

We know that we will feel 
worse if we don't try again.

Giving up and leaving the garden dead is not an option. 

We replant knowing that we are living under a heaven of hailstones ready to take all that we have labored for at any moment.

In Wyoming, we know that our beautiful garden is just one white-capped cloud away from being turned into a graveyard of petals and stems.

Yet~ 

We press on despite the despair. 

We put our hands back in the soil and make a home for new life. We treat each seed as a middle finger to hail.  We remember that hail always melts but we don't have to.  

We will outlast any storm. 

Life is too much of a cosmic miracle 
to give up on it so easily.
  
This is how a Wyoming 
Gardener must live their craft. 

We plant. We hope. We watch the hail come. We have our hearts broken. We heal. We replant. We fight like hell for one lilac bush or one cucumber. We don't let death win.  

This is how gardening works here. 

This is also how hope works everywhere.

Often, desolation comes over the horizon to steal our hope without much of a forecast. Desolation comes like a hail storm to remind us that life is too fragile to bear.