My dad sometimes got exasperated with me. He sometimes got exasperated with me and, looking back, I can’t say I blame him. After all, while his passion was to nurture life within his precious gardens, mine was to kick back with a good book. While his burden was to do things well, mine was to do them with the least effort possible. I’m sure I didn’t make much of an employee on those days I accompanied him to job sites. For a number of years much of dad’s work was done on a rich man’s estate not far from here. I remember a day when he brought me along to help him plant some flowerbeds. He dug the holes and I dropped a flower into each one, then pressed the soil back around the roots. When all had been planted, he left me to water while he turned his attention to other matters. I took the hose in hand, gave everything a quick spray, then got my book from the truck and settled against a tree to catch up on some comics. Sure enough, he soon hauled me back to the flowerbed to water it all again. “I told you to water everything well and I expect you to do it. Do it again, and this time do it right!” I guess I learned a lesson that day, though in retrospect it was rather an obvious one. I learned that you can’t just give freshly-planted flowers a quick spray in the heat of a Canadian … Continue reading When We Go Unnourished