Fantastic Friday: Seeds

I  came home after a week away at vacation, and my already un-weeded front garden looked even more unruly than usual. I took a closer look—you know, to triage the situation, pull the most easy and unruly of the plants. That’s when I noticed a type of plant I don’t normally see. It had dark leaves and large yellow-orange flowers that looked like…

Pumpkin!

Last fall, I had been carving pumpkins on the walkway with my daughter. We put the “pumpkin guts” into a cardboard box to compost, but a few seeds must have slipped away and gone unnoticed by the dozens of mice/voles/chipmunks/whatever else ate most of my vegetable garden last summer.

So now, in a year when I didn’t plant a garden, I have the chance of at least a small crop.

It’s an apt metaphor. Our act of carving a pumpkin had repercussions beyond our knowledge. It’s the same with our actions. We may not see the stray seed that falls away and ends up sprouting underground, but it’s there nonetheless.

We can never be sure how our actions touch others, but we can rest assured that they do—sometimes in ways we expect, and sometimes in ways we could never predict.