Gazpacho

Friday I gathered up tomatoes and cucumbers from my garden and dropped them off at my neighbor’s house.

Today I’m eating her homemade gazpacho for lunch.

Over the last two months, we’ve passed out close to 50 jars of pickles to our friends, church community, next door neighbors, and even a random woman who walks her dogs past our house each morning.

One sunday, another congregant shared her abundance of home-made sourdough loaves.

Last year a good friend offered me a small bag of sunflower seeds from the flowers she’s been cultivating in her yard for years.

This morning, my garden is swarming with bees and Goldfinches who survive from the flowers that have grown immensely tall and dense in my front yard raised beds.

Those bees also pollinated the cucumbers, watermelons, eggplants, and squash that we’ve been able to enjoy ourselves and share widely.

When my wife’s mother passed after months in and out of the hospital, friends and loved ones flooded our home with home-cooked meals, beautiful flowers, and heartfelt cards offering sympathy and support.

Many, if not all, of the friends who showed up in person to drop off gifts and hugs left with their arms full of the produce we didn’t have the mental or emotional capacity to cook for ourselves.

This spring, I poured my blood, sweat, and even a few tears into the earth in front of our modest South Austin home. I dug a small, in-ground bed for the first time, dropped a few potatoes into the ground and covered them with straw.

Last night, my wife and I pulled up beautiful purple and gold potatoes from the small piece of the earth we’ve been given to steward.

Right now, sitting in my kitchen I am painfully aware of the Sin of Adam.

One countertop is full of produce: butternut squash, cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, yellow summer squash, potatoes, so much we don’t know what to do with it. How do you even eat that many tomatoes?

The shelves on the other side of the kitchen are full of plastic packaging and pre-made snacks that feel much easier to manage. They won’t rot any time soon, they’re “fortified” with added protein, vitamins, and minerals, they have everything we need to survive!

This is Original Sin: To be given the bounty of this Earth, and refuse it because we want to feel secure. To be offered the abundance of reciprocity, and decide we want more. To look at the beauty and symbiosis of Nature, and then choose to play God instead.

The pre-packaged snacks and canned goods are purchased from a store and sit in our pantry until we decide to use them. They are safe (and honestly, quite useful), but they are static.

This produce is active, vibrant, alive. These fruits and vegetables must MOVE. From the earth, to the kitchen, into our bodies, or the bodies of our friends, and back to the earth again. They are risky, they wait for no one, they are tiny embodiments of Life Itself. They are drawing me into something bigger than myself. They are bringing me to God’s table.

And this is some damn fine gazpacho.