My mom takes pride in her garden. It’s not your typical garden with four tomato plants, small row of beans, a pumpkin plant, and you’re done. Her garden is a twenty-four foot by thirty foot chunk of yard that my mom tends to almost more than her twenty-year old daughter. Weeding the garden was my least favorite thing to do and something I always dreaded.
While weeding my mom’s garden on the early summer mornings, my mom would have me take out my iPod and listen to what she has learned from the weeds. She taught me that we could both go out and weed every day for a short amount of time or not very often for a very long time. The longer we waited to go out and weed the harder our job became. She compared different weeds to different behaviors. She taught me about the weed called "Morning Glory" that would spread itself out across the garden, wind around the strawberry plants and "strangle" them. The Morning Glory was always easy to pull out, as long as it was pulled before it had wrapped around the plant. Different behaviors in people’s lives can, just like the morning glory, strangle us and end up killing us spiritually, morally, or even physically. I never really appreciated these valuable moments with my wonderful mom until after I moved out and realized my mom had taught me an important lesson about work. The lesson I learned from my mom all those summer mornings in the garden can be summed up in a phrase from President Gordon B. Hinckley that is hanging above our kitchen window showcasing a perfect view of the garden:
“Without work, nothing grows but Weeds.”
