Only a red streak remained on the western horizon. A cold breeze tugged at my ragged coat collar. From a distance, a soft warm yellow light came through the kitchen window. Inside, my mother was standing at the stove preparing supper.
My father turned another section of soil over, and I knelt on the damp earth picking potatoes out of the loose dirt. I was 8 or 9. Each year in the autumn, at the time of the first frost, my father came to the back door after being in the field all day. He held an old dented metal pail and a garden fork. “Let’s go dig the potatoes.” And we would walk silently out to the garden as the sun set behind tall corn.
Every year, when I hear the first flock of geese, this memory returns.
My father has been dead for a few decades now, yet every fall I find my way to a garden with a potato fork and a bucket.
In this age of hate, struggle, conflict, division, information overload in nonstop 24-hour news cycles, it is important to know what keeps you grounded. What is the constant in your life? What keeps you grounded in reality when all seems out of control and unreal around you?
It is the constants in our lives that will see us through the hard times.
I am Dan Kenney, and this is my perspective.
