The minute I turned into the parking lot I saw them: tall, shelved carts filled with colorfully blossoming plants. The store’s garden center appeared to have more plants than room, so the workers had lined the sidewalk beside the store with the overflow.
Usually, going to a garden center fills me with excitement and anticipation. Today, remembering that I was only two and a half months post hip replacement, I felt ambivalent. I wanted to buy plants, put in a garden, and take care of flowerbeds, but I didn’t know if I could physically bend over far enough to do the necessary work. Immediately after the surgery, bending at the waist more than 90 degrees was prohibited.

I’ve been feeling afraid to bend down to weed my flowerbeds for fear of hurting myself and find that I quickly tire after a very short spell of work, but I keep trying. Slowly, I’m hoping to build my stamina back up.

As I walked though the aisles of plants, picking out a modest amount of baby plants that needed to be tucked into a moist, earthen bed, my excitement mounted to the point where I ended up buying more plants than I had originally planned to buy. When I reported my purchases to my daughter I explained, “Do you remember the comedian who liked to claim, ‘The devil made me do it!?’ Well, the devil had nothing to do with my plant purchases. What happened was that an able-bodied gardener temporally took possession of my body and made me do it.”

Speaking of the devil, besides worrying about my post-surgical ability to bend enough to garden, I also worried about the overwhelming number of blood-sucking insects in my yard.

Most backyards have mosquitoes, but in addition to them, every single year for a period that coincides with garden planting, I have thick, black clouds of tiny bugs my family calls ‘no see-ums.’ Despite what we call them, you can see them and feel the ticklish sensation of them crawling on your skin. They like to buzz and bounce around like pinballs behind glasses, inside ear channels and at the nostrils. Some of the spots they steal blood from welt and itch, many other puncture spots produce an inch long blood dribble to show where they’ve been. No see-ums particularly like to draw blood from a person’s entire hairline, especially when the skin is damp with sweat. But that doesn’t mean they don’t also wander into a forest of head hair in search for a bloody picnic.

The cloud of gnats covered my body as I picked up the clippings. I shook my head, swatted at the tips of my ears, swiped at my neck skin, and ran my dirty gloves up and down my bare arms. I asked out loud, “Lord, why did you create these bugs? Did they start out good, but turned bad like the fallen angels? That’s something I could believe, because they act like Satan’s emissaries!”
While trying to screw the water hose onto the spicket, one of the insects tried to land inside my left eye. That was too much for me. I dropped everything and ran into the house. As I washed up, I noticed blood trickles from the corner of my right eye, on my left temple and from the inside of my right ear. Itchy welts lined my entire hairline and in patches all over my scalp. The final insult was the swelling of my right eyelid.

The ‘no see-ums’ certainly took my mind off the anxiety I had about physically bending to do garden work. It’s getting easier. But what’s getting harder every time I go outside, is bending my mind to recognize those horrid bugs as God’s beloved creatures.