Another post that I meant to publish a lot sooner when it would have been much more relevant.

Planting a garden often leads to visions of abundance and self-sufficiency. For every container of strawberries Erica buys at the grocery store while her own very small strawberries are ripening, I know she envisions herself filling one of these containers with her own strawberries. 

This is almost never the case with a garden of that size. There’s not enough sun, the soil is not fertile, no matter how much she does to improve it, and the space allotted to her is fairly small. In her head, she knows this, but that does not stop the dreams of harvests abundant enough to put a dent in her grocery bills. 

Nevertheless, Erica was delighted by her first harvest of eight tiny strawberries. I had braced myself for the disappointed meltdown. It is so easy, when everything else is letting you down, to prop all your hopes and dreams on one aspect of your life. But instead, Erica found the joy in her eight little strawberries that together probably weigh as much as one grocery store strawberry. Instead of trying to replace her groceries with her garden food, she chose to see these little ones as a bonus. An extra treat in her day that made her look forward to coming home from work every night.

-Ella

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