Sweet Million

This morning I walked out on our balcony to see that our tomato plant was now stretching more than a foot above its stake. The sprawling Sweet Million cherry tomato seems bent on living up to its name; it sends out new branches every few days and is increasingly pregnant with tiny green orbs.

This tomato is the behemoth of our balcony garden, outshining our other attempts to augment our lack of a back yard with khaki-colored plastic pots. The companion tomato plant dwindles in a neighboring pot a mere quarter of the size of its gigantic cousin. Two pumpkin plants poke up near the railing, small but determined—despite their lack of vines, they already have buds (which my farm-boy husband informs me are the male flowers, first to appear but full of only pollen, not fruit, potential). Behind and to the left, tiny melon plants wiggle in the breeze.

As I pollinate tomato flowers with my fingertip, I'm reminded of my parents' vegetable garden back in Wisconsin. We had one every year--a black-earth sprawl bursting with vegetation to feed a family of ten and weeds--so many weeds yanked from the ground by me and my siblings. Oh I hated it--hated the shivering dryness of the dirt on my hands and bare feet and the endless, shadeless rows always waiting expectantly--ironically, as much as I now long for something more alive than this balcony fading into muted gray wood grain. Oh how things change...

Murky

Conversations whirl around me as I work from my corner of Caribou Coffee, blending with the soothing, though all-too-familiar strands of the store’s music CD. It’s the same one they played yesterday and the day before.

I know because this is day three of work-in-the-coffeehouse week. It’s nearing the end of month 2 of my stint as a contract writer, and I’ve migrated here from home office to couch to dining room table, each stop an attempt at an environment conducive to productivity. The growing files have put me ahead of schedule, bringing my fevered pace down to a leisurely dabbling punctuated by perusing the latest headlines on foxnews.com or an attempt to resurrect my long-neglected blog. I should feel, I don’t know…accomplished or satisfied with the positive feedback from my client and my first check newly center-pieced on our dining room table, but they do little to quell my growing restlessness.

I feel like I’m in some sort of mid-twenties mid-life crisis, which sounds too dramatic to even my own frustration. But the description fits—I’m stuck in a career that uses my degree but bores me to tears (literally). And my recent move to North Dakota does nothing to move me toward a career more in tune with my interests. As I scroll daily through health care and engineering job postings, I feel out of place with a head full of the writing theory, literature, and the ability to massage words into a pleasing hum of rhythm, syntax, and connotation.

As I wake up next to my husband, I know I wouldn’t change any of the complex web of choices that brought me to this new apartment in this wind-swept prairie city. Some things even my dream career can’t eclipse. Yet I wonder sometimes whether the path I’ve chosen will ever loop back. I have to hope that there will be something that tastes of the satisfaction I sipped as an undergrad sprawled in a professor’s office discussing literature and writing theory.

This week I've been able to trust, to remember that God is sovereign, that he is Father and his plans are not for calamity, his will good, pleasing, and perfect. But lately my gaze is less than steady and the wind and waves make my footing on the water shaky at best. So I wait with something less than patience, hoping with imperfect faith that my next step will materialize in this murky present.