Garden Gifts

My neighbors were only feet away from the miracle when it happened. 
They filmed it all from their back porch.

In the corner of our back yard, squarely over a small above-ground garden, on a mostly sunny day, it rained. It poured thickly, like water from one of those nouveau shower heads the size of a dinner plate. Except this downpour covered the area of a supper table.

But no more than that. For only there, just on the tiny backyard garden, fell the rain that day. Everywhere else was dry.

For ten minutes – surely longer than the time the son of Mary walked on water – the rains came upon my little neglected plot, soaking the soil. Yet the split rail fence next to it was bone dry.

I was not even home to witness the blessed event! Yet the video verifies it all.

We look for purposes to such things, but I have no interpretive key.

Yet maybe something better than a key: A memory. A distant but vivid memory of a childhood walk in a widow’s garden. Purple irises. Riotous orange tiger lilies, and a primeval garden spider’s web spanning the difference.

And all gilded with diamonds – diamonds! Diamonds everywhere! Or -- no less marvelous -- rain droplets from the night before, refracting morning sunshine.

I walked in a new world that morning, a boy in the widow’s garden, enraptured in my earthly Eden.

And I’ve been looking for a way back to that place ever since. I’ve found hope in a man’s prayers in another garden.

Does my neighbor’s video speak of that better logic, I wonder? For maybe the Garden’s glory will find me, instead. I’m going to be looking for it next time.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll try to be home.