Germinate

So my new roommates are three charming young men who are obsessed with seeds and soil and soul and earth. We have been eating watermelon and they save the seeds, sprinkling them on the lawn. There are drying olive pits on the kitchen table. We have water bottles and beer bottles and things set up out back with cuttings in them. We have tiny tupperware full of soil sprinkled with seeds and a compost heap started in a large green plastic pot that we've moved far away from the back door. We have a tiny little lattice made of twine and twigs snaking up one of our fences for the passion flower that has already begun sprouting tendrils and wrapping up and around it. There is a hollowed out half cantaloupe with seeds and soil inside it, cantaloupe seeds already sprouting, in the patch of earth in front of our house. There is also a pineapple top that was immediately planted there after we ate the fruit beneath it last week. All this and we've been sharing the house on Strawberry Street less than a month. I don't participate much but for gawking and they've got me all excited about what is going to grow.

I have been watering a garden though, the vegetable and herb and flower garden of a neighbor of ours who has been away this past week. I talked a bit to the plants today; I asked them to grow and tell Nancy that we've been taking good care of them.

As I report all this to you, I'm sitting in a cafe a mile away from Strawberry Street and the people sitting next to me are getting into a spirited conversation about Jesus. I've got to get out of here and back to the seeds.