Like grass

"As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone."* — Psalm 103:15-16

The psalmist says our days are like grass and I have been trying all week to make that verse do what I want it to do, and it will not.

I want it to be about comfort. I want the psalmist to be saying something gentle about the shortness of life, something I can nod at over coffee and carry into the day feeling wise and settled. I want the metaphor to behave. Grass, flowers, wind, gone — there is a sermon in there that writes itself, about the brevity of earthly things and the permanence of God, and I have heard that sermon and I have given a version of that sermon to third-graders using construction paper and a fan, and it is true and it is not what the verse is doing to me this week.

What the verse is doing to me this week is the garden.

I closed the garden yesterday. The beds are bare. The marigolds are gone. The tomato cages are stacked by the barn. And the psalmist says the wind passes over it and it is gone, and I sat at this table this morning and the word that stopped me was *it*. Not the grass. Not the flower. *It.* The wind passes over *it* — over the place where the flower was, the place where the grass was, the spot of ground that held the thing that is no longer there.

That is what October looks like from the kitchen window. The spot of ground that held the thing.

I am not trying to make this about Earl. I am aware that everything I write in October sounds like it is about Earl whether I mean it to or not, and this morning I genuinely mean the garden. I mean the six bare beds and the empty fence and the marigolds that were there yesterday and are not there today, and the psalm that says the wind passes and the thing is gone and the ground does not hold it.

But the psalm does not stop there. The next verse — the one the sermon usually skips — says the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting. Not the flower. Not the grass. The love. The thing that was there before the flower came up and will be there after the wind has passed, and the ground remembers it even when there is nothing to show.

That is a different sermon. That is the one I am sitting with this morning.

Lord, the garden is bare and your love is not. That is the whole verse.