Waiting

Waiting

Posted by Heather Harris

I am very bad at waiting. This is of course a failing of human nature. It seems odd that God would make us so horribly impatient when everything requires patience. Maybe it's because a lifetime to us is nothing in the context of cosmic time. Maybe that's why dogs are so slobberingly, deliriously excited for you to throw a stick during fetch. In dog years, by my unscientific calculations, the thirty seconds that you are toying with them, faking tosses and laughing at their stupidity, is like waiting for three minutes. I don't know about you, but three minutes of a practical joke at my expense, repeated over and over would drive me a bit loony too.

I am currently waiting for a call on a job interview that I had this week. My phone is glued to my hip. Under "Recent Calls", which I keep checking compulsively despite the fact that not only does my phone ring when a call comes in but it also flashes blue, vibrates, and pops a notice up on the screen, my most recent call is from my sister 13 hours ago. To a dog that would be like five days. My finger nails are wearing out from the percussive tapping on every surface where I wait. Somewhere in the deep wrinkles of my brain, I know that the artfully crafted kindergarten lesson I taught at the interview was awesome, but as the minutes tick on, I imagine every minute flaw as the reason a call isn't coming in. Surely I was a complete moron and just didn't know it.

Without waiting though, how would we know hope? And hope, while extremely difficult to muster as my silent phone lays black and lifeless at my side, is a far better feeling than the inbred, backwoods cousins of impatience: annoyance, dread, despair, and self doubt.

I was certain three days ago that my cucamelons were done for. My kale, planted on the same day, was 8 inches tall. My peas were blooming, the massive scarlet runner beans were winding their way up the trellis like something out of Jack and the Bean Stock. My cucamelons had not even poked through. My husband enthusiastically pointed to a wild tomato seedling and said, "There's one!", in much the same way that he keeps saying, "They'll call!" Zucchini seeds were popping up, CARROTS were popping up. Wandering visitors kept stopping at the empty box of dirt saying, "What's in there?" I'd say as hopefully as possible, "Oh, those are my cucamelons. They haven't come up yet..." Then I would quickly distract them with the freakish bean plants before they could ask any more questions. And then, just when I was about to rifle through my dirty, half empty pile of seed packets to find something else to plant in there, two of the tiniest little leaves you've ever seen from a squash seed emerged from the soil. The next day, green seedlings were sprinkled all over. Turns out it can take four weeks for those dang things to germinate. Once again, seeds proved that they will, in fact, grow, in their own time, and there's nothing we can do about it. What looks like a pile of dirt in May will be so overgrown and claustrophobic in September that you will beg for the first frost so that it will all rot away and you can finally catch your breath.

And so, I wait...