The Marketplace Magazine September/October 2022

Soul Enterprise

Living and giving thanks with a farmer’s perspective

By Thomas Froese

My father taught me to have a farmer’s perspective.

We weren’t farmers. Not with a farm. We just had a garden. But what a garden. At times, like in spring during planting, it wouldn’t be unusual for my father and I to work into the night, just the two of us under the moonlight, our hands digging in the cold muck.

Five houses, with yards and children and all that, now sit where we’d grown carrots and beets and potatoes and cabbage. The rambling house that was home — an old 1870s estate home — still stands, but with difficulty. Most rooms now have neither occupancy nor life.

When you’re growing up, a garden, like everything, seems even larger. And even though, when I was very young, I’d apparently tell people “When I grow up, I want to be a father and a farmer,” the truth is that the garden was not a favourite spot.

For one, that supersized plot was hard to maintain. The weeds seemed as large as Douglas Firs. Other activities, I reasoned, should be filling my days.

My father thought differently. It wasn’t just the garden. He worked on the house also, for decades, his tools often in hand. It was all part of our family business, a so-called rest home. We took in people who fell through the cracks and had no home of their own. Some were old. Some weren’t. Some had psychiatric issues. Most had no family, or no family that cared. Food from the garden — at harvest it went into freezers for winter — was food for supper.

One resident, Gerry, a former boxer, would say to me, “Tommy, promise me that you’ll never go into boxing.” He worked that garden until his hands calloused.

Stephen, later, helped. He died one Easter Sunday. Other residents were less capable. Walter had kidneys shot from drink.

Donna arrived in her 20s, her brain somehow fried already. Others made an entire church choir of out of-tune characters.

Bert had epileptic seizures. All the time. Once he had one while my father held him on his lap, there, at the kitchen table, at the window.

That’s where Bert, unexpectantly, remarkably, pushed out his life’s last, exhausted breath. It was like a punctured bike tire. My father held him for some time. It was just the three of us.

My father’s first wife, my mother, had died some years earlier. She never saw that garden. So my father, with help, was a single dad. But when he later remarried, when I was best man, it was a good time to talk about it, this farmer’s perspective.

You put a seed in the ground. It dies. Cracks open. The rain comes. So does the sun. Then something new, which needs constant tending, grows.

Finally, the harvest. The concept relates to all sorts of life matters. Like, say, your vocation. Or relationships. And salvation itself.

Jesus loved to use the agrarian imagery for his teaching. “A man bought a field,” or “A farmer scattered some seed,” or “The fields are ready for harvest, but where are the workers?” Then, to make sure we got the point, Jesus went off and died. Went into the ground. Cracked open. Spilled his own blood to redeem the curse of Eden, that first garden.

Not all of this came to mind when I spoke at my father’s wedding. But some did. And to mark the occasion, for a wedding gift, I gave him a golden hoe.

It was just a garden hoe from Canadian Tire. Nothing special. Some gold paint did the trick. But it’s a tangible reminder of those garden memories. Thirty years on, I’m told, it’s still somewhere in that old home.

Funny enough, long after I left the garden, I lived and worked in East Africa, for 12 years, with my own family, in Uganda, just one nation where millions of people sustain themselves by working land with tools like a common garden hoe.

All those garden plots, an economic backbone in a place rich in humanity, where you’ll often hear the children pray, “We’re thankful for the gift of life.”

And behind the modest bungalow that was our family’s East African home, I grew a small garden. It gave, for one, some garden time for me and my own son.

It comes to mind this fall. Even as it did at my father’s funeral. This is the year we buried Dad Froese. I said a few words. So did others.

Then we pushed soil overtop my father. It was spring. It was a simple casket. Just a pine box, at his request, which came from the Mennonite heritage he so much prized. “When I’m in my pine box,” he’d say.

My father lived to 90. His life, like that garden, was full. I’m grateful. Books could be written. Stories told. In some other place. .

Thomas Froese is a journalist in Hamilton, Ontario. He writes about news, travel, and life. You can read more of his reflections at www. thomasfroese.com

Margo Head photo

In this 2016 photo, Thomas Froese is with his son Jonathan in the garden of their former Ugandan home.