For a long time, i felt like I couldn’t explain the concept of hope to my daughter.

There are a lot of things in this world I want to — need to — talk to the kids in my home about, of course.  Things like kindness. Love. Patience. Confidence. Empathy. Bravery. Courage. The list could go on forever.  But the thing I keep bumping up against is hope.

Look, I can explain a lot of things to a kid.  I am, after all, a librarian, in addition to being a mother.  Explaining, finding, searching, researching — these are all things in my wheelhouse.  Ask me to explain kindness, that’s easy! Kindness is doing things for others that make them feel good and loved.  Confidence? Thinking you can do it, even if you aren’t really sure that you can. Bravery? Standing up and facing something scary even if you don’t want to and think it might be hard or might hurt.  

But hope?

How do you explain hope to a kid in this crazy, mixed-up, often-awful, often-bleak world?  

The garden, of course.  As summer bursts onto the scene, so too do the plants in the garden we’ve grown out in our backyard.  There is a bounty of squash, tomatoes to fill bellies for days, raspberries to turn fingers sticky-pink, greens for salads, peppers to season just about anything with a little extra pep.  My daughter has taken a keen interest in the garden (I’d like to give ourselves a pat on the back for that one since we’ve been doing the garden hustle since before she was born, even helping start a community one, but at the same time, kids sometimes just like what they like, and parental credit may not be as gleaming as I like to think, har har).  For her preschool “passion project” she picked gardening, and dutifully answered all the questions her classmates had.

I know I’m not the first to talk about seeds and hope in tandem.  But darn if it isn’t a really useful show-and-tell. We plant the seeds in the soil, and we know that if the sun shines and the rain comes, then we can look forward to the seeds turning into food and flowers.  But right when we plant those seeds, yes — the garden is empty, and the only way we know it might not always be that way is the knowledge that it’s been barren and then full again in due time, according to nature’s cycles (and, let’s be honest, whims — I still remember not-too-fondly the hailstorm that took out all our corn in one fell swoop…).  

Out of nothing, we know something may come.  

I think about hope in the context of raising kids a lot.  We parents have so many aspirations. But often, what we’re dealing with is the soil, loamy and sometimes (again, being honest) full of manure.  There are days when it feels less like I’m lovingly planting seeds while hoping for a good future, then striking the soil with a shovel, sweat pouring down my face, tired and just taking the best whack I can at things.  But even on those days, which we all have, the soil is being tended. I don’t hope for financial success or fame or professional acclaim for my kids’ futures. I want them to be emotionally intelligent and I want them to have futures that are full of love.  

Of course, I can’t see how that will turn out right now.

Just like I tell my daughter though — when we plant the seeds, we know that it’s possible the thing we want will grow, in time.  Maybe it won’t grow exactly the way we planned — those carrots knotted in the dirt that one time when they couldn’t’t reach down any further! — but they grew, and were good.  

Huh.

Maybe I was teaching myself about hope right along with them.

So as we go into the heady, hot days of summer, keep your chin up.  You’re planting seeds. They’re gonna grow up lovely.