Tending this patch of ground

In the closing session at the C.S. Lewis Writer’s Conference in early May,

Jonathan Rogers

encouraged the 200 or so attendees to view our work in the world as that of the innkeepers along a pilgrim route, nurturing our patch of ground and the people who come by. 

Every reader is on a journey and writers are the host. You don’t have to take them all the way, and you don’t have to chase them down the road, hawking your wares. Just make your patch of ground better.¹

We learned from him that the words guest and host come from the same root, implying a symbiosis of sorts. One cannot be a host if there are no guests, and vice versa. There are “reciprocal duties of hospitality”. ²

The day before, Tim and I had lunch at a table with several interesting people including Jonathan and his wife, Lou Alice. One of our topics of conversation was the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route with paths through France, Portugal, and Spain, and Jonathan mentioned that it was part of his closing talk for the next day.

In the pre-COVID world, Tim and I were saving and dreaming of walking the Camino for our 25th wedding anniversary. We thought the summer of 2021 would be a perfect time to take a month away in Europe, seeing some of it on foot and maybe visiting Greece and Italy as well. 

January of 2021 was when we began praying about the deli, and three months later we were investing everything we’d saved into the restoration and resurrection of this business that would keep us fairly anchored and close to home. We set aside our dreams of Europe and took up the tending of a very local patch of ground.

“We were going to walk the Camino but we bought a deli instead,” I flippantly added to the conversation. 

The week after we returned from the conference in Colorado, we hosted friends from India for a few days. We have been their guests multiple times and our daughter, Bailey, spent two months in their village during her sophomore year of college, teaching english. Being their host was an honor, even in the midst of a busy week.

We are never completely the hosts we want to be or plan to be, and we didn’t get to do all the things we would’ve liked during their short stay. Tim had a job that week which required his best 12 hours or more each day, and he couldn’t spend the time he would have liked with our guests.

I was able to take them to the botanical gardens at Shore Acres, showing them the Pacific Ocean and freezing them to the bone in the bitter wind. They laughed in amazement that they could ever be so cold, and took picture after picture of the landscape. We endured the Pacific winds to watch sea lions near the shore. But at the gardens I was a little disappointed that only the rhododendrons were in bloom. I wished the roses and dahlias were on parade, or the daffodils and tulips we had just missed.

At home, only my snowball bush was in bloom. My peonies were still tight green buds, and the daylilies, the roses, and the vegetable garden all were solidly green in their infancy. 

We told them about the coyotes and racoons we are hunting around the chicken coop, about the cougars and bobcats our road is named for, and about the deer and bear in our freezer, harvested nearby. But on our walk we only saw the neighbor’s goats, which are weird but boring creatures.

I wanted to show them the novelty of Oregon in May but all the things I thought would be interesting were unavailable. 

What was available were the things that seemed ubiquitous—the ordinary wild turkeys, which are like rodents to us; rhododendrons, beautiful but not as cherished as my peonies; scotch broom, so invasive, non-native, and weed-like. They were in awe of these everyday things.

And the evergreens. Even my love for them seemed slight in view of our guests' amazement. They took video after video on our drives, in complete awe of a land so green and lush. 

I wanted to show them all the things I thought were best. Right now there are three full vases of pink and white peonies in my house, sprigged with orange and coral snapdragons. The wildflowers are reaching above the uncut grass of our pasture, swaying gloriously in the warm wind. A deer stood in our driveway this morning, contemplating which field to graze in, and the spotted and speckled fawns are hiding but not hidden in the bushes at the side of the road. 

Our guests had really hoped to see a skunk. 

These friends who live among jungles full of the best bananas and mangoes you’ve ever tasted, where plants I try to keep alive in my house grow wild and large in their backyard—a land full of monkeys and a few tigers and some really exotic and scary reptiles and spiders—they were thrilled to see the ordinary stuff of Oregon in early May.

I looked again at the scotchbroom that grows rampant along interstate 5 on the drive to drop them off at the airport. It is actually beautiful, scattered at the edge of a profuse green wood.

We haven’t made it to Europe. 

We’ll be guests at our daughter and son-in-law’s Friday night, and we’ll celebrate our 28th anniversary holding our grandson on Saturday. Then we’ll drive the three hours home to our little plot of ground where we’ve cultivated a life and a living, and we’ll be hosts to people in our home and our deli. Our work here is part of pilgrimage, even though our hospitality falls short. 

Jonathan encouraged writers to love our readers by tending to the things we love and introducing our readers to them. He told us to give what we have, and that no one would be mad at us for what we don’t have. There are many stops on this pilgrimage and we are just one.

I hope you get a feel for the things I love. There is so much I don’t have and my tendency is to apologize for the lack, but I’m adding to the list of loves all the time so I think I’ll have plenty to share, and very little to complain about. I am pilgrim and an inn-keeper, guest and host, just trying to make my patch of ground a little better and thankful to see this place through the eyes of my traveling friends.

1. paraphrased

2. https://www.etymonline.com/word/host#etymonline_v_14483