Toad in a hole

Why don't you just sit on the allotment and enjoy the peace and quiet?

Three people have suggested this to me recently, so I decided to go and sit under the damson tree. 

Take a pebble someone suggested.  I picked up a lovely smooth toffee-like piece of flint, ochre yellow, about an inch and a half long.  I was going to examine its cracks and fissures and its crazed surface. 

It was a bit dirty so I decided to wash it so that its colours would come out.

There was a sound rather like a squeak coming from the bath which is being turned into a pond.  A toad.  Resting its front legs on the black plastic liner, small body inflated with fear, sending out ripples.

I washed the pebble and immediately went back for the toad. 

A pebble is inanimate.  It grows warm from the warmth of your hand.  It lies smooth in your palm.  It invites thoughts on time, and history and clay.  Slow pebbles work themselves to the surface season by season from the subsoil of ages.

A toad is cold, where the water has brought its temperature down, but as its body warms it begins to become restive.  Still inflated its sides but now eager to escape from your cupped hands.

I put the toad down on the asparagus patch, close to the place where I know that frogs and toads lie up until the evening comes.  First it returned to its proper size, then it paused, and finally it crawled away.

I have kept the pebble, like a tiny stone egg.  My toad is safe. 

Seasonal tasks

On an allotment no-one tells you what to do.  No bosses, no exam deadlines, no worries.  The fruit and veg. follow their seasonal rhythms and as you attune yourself to them the next task becomes obvious.  Our summer raspberries fruited and flourished early, so it was time to cut down old canes as the new ones took their place.  Spinach, a biennial, left unattended in hot weather eventually bolted and flowered.  Its deep roots come out, with a tug, and into the raised bed went new seed.  I have sown autumn carrots and winter cabbages.  The blackberries sent out next year's growth and I will trim them to encourage them to branch along the hedge.  This sowing and growing, reaping and digging becomes a pattern of life.

Weeds are continual, of course.  After the showers, they spring up; persistent ones - sow thistles, buttercups, mare's tail; pretty ones that still need to come out - miniature pink and white convolvulus and speedwell; edible ones that I have never dared try - fat hen, nettles. 

Despite the disorderly season with its spring drought we have begun to harvest cabbage, carrots, courgettes and can see the orderly growth of our winter larder: squashes, maincrop potatoes, jerusalem artichokes, leeks. 

In my gratitude I reflect on Daniel 2:20 and 21.  I do not understand the national and international events of our era, but I am beginning to sense how the seasons play themselves out year by year.  God orchestrates both. 

"Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever,
to whom belong wisdom and might.
He changes times and seasons;
he removes kings and sets up kings;
he gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to those who have understanding;
he reveals deep and mysterious things;
he knows what is in the darkness,
and the light dwells with him."