Opinion

I’ve fully committed to yet another year of trying to grow vegetables and herbs. Thus, over the weekend, I carefully went through all of the seed packets, and looked up all the information on starting each individual kind of seed, figuring out which ones need to be started indoors, and which need to be put directly into the ground.

I once walked down Wabasha Avenue in downtown St. Paul and was stopped by an old wino who asked for something to eat and when I gave him a couple bucks, he said, “You’re Garrison Keillor, you can do better than that.” The man had bad habits but his thinking was clear. I was a nobody from Anoka who got his picture on the cover of Time and my notoriety should mean profits for the needy. But that was many years ago and fame fades fast. I haven’t been recognized by a wino for at least thirty years.

Wow. What a busy week. And the coming week will not slow down for many of you. Congratulations to all the young people in the area that competed or are going to compete this coming week in the State Basketball Championships. Your commitment to basketball is awesome.

It’s about that time of year again where I convince myself that I can, indeed, grow a magnificent garden such as my grandma has always done There’s only been a couple of summers in my life where I actually accomplished this. Whether it be because the weather is challenging, or I don’t have a yard, or because I put in all the effort to plant everything and then became too busy to manage the plot of land that was clearly going to always be a challenge with weeds growing over because it was a first year till - there’s always been a struggle.

This time of year, I sometimes think of the poem Pippa Passes (1841) by Robert Browning.

INT. SPORTS BAR - DAY

So. Did you remember to set your alarm clocks ahead one hour before you went to sleep Saturday night? Or do you have smart clocks that do it for you? I didn’t reset any of my clocks hoping that some of them would reset automatically. I use my phone as my alarm clock and I knew that would change by itself. I am writing this early Sunday morning, so time will tell when some of our congregation comes to church an hour late.

With the warmer weather, the opportunity to get outdoors more often, and enjoy the spaces that surround us has been more frequent. Likewise, the melting of the snow (what little we did have), has also revealed what we haven’t seen in awhile.

It’s been cold. An engaged audience might ask: How cold was it? A type of punchline: It was so cold the ice was complaining about the temperature! The reality is more mundane. It was so cold they cancelled school. This has happened before. I grew up in Texas, a geography not known for cold temperatures. One winter day was so cold that they cancelled schools. They were concerned the HVAC wasn’t up to the job. No school administrator wants to take in warm bodied children and spit them out blue. It was 29 degrees Fahrenheit.