A Garden in Babylon

---

A True Story from Home

April is young, and I’m in my garden as often as I can be. Today, I have company. My nephew, Bennett, is kneeling in the zucchini patch beside a Red Ryder wheelbarrow. He asked if he could help, so he’s weeding the clover that crept up in early March, tossing clumps aside. The skies are clear, and he’s tied his little sweatshirt around the picket fence. I keep an eye on him from the main garden, where I’m working between raised beds and rooting up what’s old—dirt, thorns, and last year’s dead zinnia stalks. 

I remember helping mom in the garden when I was Bennett’s size. One of my favorite days of the year was the morning when Papa Jay motored his tiller around the pond to turn up the garden plot for us. When he’d finished, the whole yard smelled of fresh soil and worms.

A garden tells the gardener’s story, and mine begins with both my Papa Jay and Papa Larry—two very different grandpas who have always kept two very different gardens. Papa Jay is thin and clean-shaven, and his yard is just as neatly-groomed. Papa Larry has a beard like Longfellow and writes poetry from the window behind his wildflowers. As I work among my own boxes in April, I like to think my garden is the grandchild of theirs. 

That is to say, I think it tells their story. 

---

Papa Jay was born on the hem of the Great Depression and lived with his mom in a shotgun house in North Venice, Illinois. She took a streetcar into downtown St. Louis each day, where she worked as a seamstress at a dress factory. When she got home, she handmade all the clothes Papa Jay wore to school. Papa says their houses were so tightly built that if his neighbor snored at night, the sound at his window kept him awake.

So when my grandparents got married and had my uncle and mom, Papa was ready to root himself somewhere with enough land to cultivate. He’d lived a barebones life that required grit and frugality, and people don’t always ease out of that mindset. Sometimes, folks who endured the Depression still live like they’re scraping by—like they need every last milk carton and dime. If you buy it, you use it. Or, in the case of a gardener like Papa Jay: If you plant it, you eat it. 

For Papa Larry living as a boy after the war, things were also tight. On Saturday mornings in autumn, his parents would drive him out of Kansas City down Highway 24, stopping at farm stands along the route, where the fresh produce was cheaper than groceries in town. Papa remembers how the tables were full of fresh vegetables, squash, pumpkins, and pies. The sun warmed glasses of local honey, strawberry jam, and orange marmalade. As a seven-year-old boy, Papa’s mouth watered at the goods, and he loved hopping out of the car for pumpkin-picking or a pony ride. 

Plants fascinated him. At home, he had his own garden plot, where he waited eagerly for his radishes and onions to sprout. Maybe the itch to grow things had come from his Grandmother Slusher, who cut dandelions and flowers for salads. Over his life, Papa Larry would know many women who planted gardens—his neighbor Mrs. Decker and his church congregant Mrs. Thurston—and I wonder if their careful way of tending the earth left an impression on him. For someone like Mrs. Thurston, gardening wasn’t just about eating. It was about making the place you had beautiful. 

---

Papa Jay’s yard is beautiful in an ordered way. There are beds and borders, pots and brick-laid patios. Plants do not grow into each other; they grow in the place he’s put them, the same way his tools hang on his pegboard. There’s a place for everything, and everything is in its place. Coneflowers to fringe the garden. Black-eyed Susans skirting the old pump. Tiger lilies marching down the path into the woods, and violets carpeting it. After building, he hacked down the weeds around the pond banks and stretched a fence around his property to make sure folks knew where the line was. He grew vegetables and planted perennials that return every spring.

If a garden tells the gardener’s story, Papa Jay’s tells one of rootedness—of building a home and working a steady job at Union Electric Company, of buying stock and staying put. 

Papa Larry traveled. He pastored a church, worked on the Sedalia police force, taught history at a college, volunteered at the local hospital, and after retiring, greeted visitors at Shaw Nature Reserve, where the prairies teemed with wildflowers. Papa began to bring the native beauty of those fields and wetlands to his little yard on Highway 50. He amended the soil with pellets from his rabbits and let the herbs and flowers spill into each other.

I remember visiting Papa Larry and Nanny’s old house and ducking through the hedges like Mary exploring the secret garden. Their home felt out of place on the roaring highway and looked more like the cottages they’d visited on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Papa traveled to New England thirty times in his life, and each time, he brought back a little piece of the Cape: a shell, a seed, or a sapling to plant. His gardens were like a scrapbook of his travels, documenting the beauty of the places he’d been.

In 2010, Papa and Nanny left the highway and moved into our (and Papa Jay’s) neighborhood outside town. Unlike Papa Jay, Papa Larry didn’t see his two acres as a blank slate to be tilled. Instead of ripping out shrubs, he planted more shrubs, native grasses, bulbs, ferns, and trees. He especially made sure to plant daffodils, which were my grandma Karen’s favorite flower and bloomed each year on her birthday.

---

Papa Jay built his house with the intention of growing old in it, but Papa Larry bought his so that my grandma would have a place near us after he died. In 2017, however, my grandma Karen passed away. She left Papa with a house full of Cape Cod treasures and a front yard teeming with all their favorite plants—including bundles of daffodils. 

Grief takes many forms, and for Papa Larry, it worked itself out in the soil. The next spring, he planted more daffodils. 

Every year that Papa Jay gets older, he swears he won’t plant another garden. Every year, he plants something anyway—a few tomatoes or potted impatiens. In all their differences, both my grandpas seem to deal with age and death the only way they know how. 

They plant gardens.

---

When the panic of Covid in 2020 gave me no place else to go, I followed my grandpas’ footsteps to the garden. While people ran and hid from the threats of sickness and death, I planted spinach and bulbs. It was not false hope or happy ignorance. No, I just needed to know that God hadn’t ceased to turn the earth in his hand.  Jesus really was making all things new. Resurrection is a reality pulsing just beneath the hard earth. 

Like the Israelites exiled to the foreign soil of Babylon, I planted a garden to remind me of that true story. 

“Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ‘Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.’” 

~ Jeremiah 29:5-6

---

That spring, Papa Jay’s redbud trees flamed, and his forsythia blazed as yellow as the sun. Down the street, Nanny’s daffodils washed up against Papa Larry’s garden pathways. Every spring since she died, Papa has wheeled himself outside and gathered a bundle for us. We sometimes take them to her grave, but I especially love it when we keep them on our kitchen table. It’s like she still has a seat there among us.

That’s the thing about plants: they often outlive people. After the first generation of Israelites died in Babylon, their fields of barley and figs would have continued to live and bear fruit. Their children might have taken up the plow to carry on their parents’ work of making their place of exile more beautiful. That’s because God didn’t just tell his people to plant gardens, but also to bear children and grandchildren who would plant gardens.

This is the way his kingdom grows.

So it’s April, and I’m in my garden as often as I can be. Today, I’m teaching Bennett how to work in the soil, hoping he’ll feel the itch to grow things just as Papa Jay, Papa Larry, and I do. I’ve been thinking, too, about how I’ll have my own garden someday. I’ve decided that I’ll plant my tomatoes in neat rows like Papa Jay, and that I’ll unleash the daffodils like Papa Larry, so that my garden will tell the story of my grandfathers before me. It’s not just the story of where I’ve come from, but of the New Eden to which I’m going. 

---