Tend

I pat the wet dirt around lettuce starts in my newly-made window box. “It isn’t really a window box,” Evangeline tells me, and she’s right. At 12 feet long and hanging from our deck railing rather than a window, it’s more like a deck box, but that doesn’t sound very nice at all. We’ll stick with window box.

It’s rainy and barely 40 degrees, and I have to get these plants in today before they dry out. My dad gave me his extras, so I’m benefiting from the tending he’s already done. I suppose that is the story of my life, actually: benefitting from the tending of my parents, already done.

I think about this word, tend, as I work, and I remember the beautiful book the girls love called A Little More Beautiful: The Story of a Garden, and its refrain: sow, tend, water, mend. The girls read this line every time we come to it (recite it, if we’re honest), and I love the sounds these words make together. In the book, a little girl notices the absence of an elderly woman, a woman whose careful touch had quietly brought beauty to the lives around her. It’s a story I want to live out, really, a story of noticing.

What does it mean, to tend? Attention seems an important part. My father-in-law told me once not to give something so much attention, because where my attention went, there went my soul (or something to that effect), and it’s stuck with me. The things I tend in my mind are not the beautiful things I tend in my life. They often don’t bring the joy that planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting my little garden bring, and they almost never have a resolution like making a meal. I may do it three times a day, but at least there is an end to each of them.

No, the things I’ve been tending in my mind are not where I want my attention to rest. What, indeed, do I want to tend to?

The minds of my children: their eager questions; their thoughtful ponderings; their desires, and their fears

My home: a sweet place of refuge from the world, if we let it be

My music: listening to and making music that moves me; teaching my students to tend to their own musical worlds

My people: this is specific, concrete, because I am learning how to better define “my people;” tending and giving attention in a way that nurtures us both

This list is not exhaustive, but, really, it feels more true because of what is not on it than what is.

This is my prayer — that I will tend to what is mine to tend to, and leave to others that which is not.

Tend