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EXCITEMENT SEEDS

When before bed last night I told Kaya that we would plant radish seeds in the garden tomorrow, her eyes lit up even though she has no real idea what seeds are, or that a few weeks from now we'll have red radishes, after I explain it all to her. She doesn't even know yet what a few 'weeks from now' means. It takes life time to grasp such graspables, and she just got here.

But excitement is certainly no problem at her age; the prospect of anything new, whatever it is, is simply exciting just for being new, like Kaya herself. So when we went out this morning and prepared the soil together, she needed no idea of what we were actually doing in order to bounce with excitement at doing it: loosening the soil, hilling it up a bit, getting out any stones she found (when I explained to her that radishes hate stones in their shoes, she cleared out even the tiniest pebbles), making a planting groove, and then when at last I opened the by now nearly mythic packet of radish seeds and began to place them in the groove, spaced about an inch apart, explaining that radishes like some room, Kaya held out her hand for some seeds then took them one-by-one in her fingers and planted them as I moved on down the row, while she just stayed in one place making sure all her seeds were happy.

Then we covered up all the seeds and went to get some shiitake for lunch. Kaya was excited at that as well, and then was excited about carrying the shiitake back to the house, then was excited at eating them. Made me think to plant a lot more of those excitement seeds in my own garden, where it's always Springtime, after all.