How to grow a parish

By KAY WINCHESTER- | Comments: 0 | Leave a comment

When I think of the word "parish," the first thing that comes to mind is radishes.

How in heaven's name do I get from a parish to a vegetable, and what do they have in common? As it turns out, a great deal.

When I was about seven years old, our parish was gearing up for a major social and fundraising event: the annual summer bazaar. It seemed as if everyone was involved in doing something, and my family was no exception. Both my parents were on the bazaar committee and my much-older brother had been tapped to do some of the heavier moving and carting of booths, chairs, merchandise and so on.

It seemed as if everyone in our house had something to do for the event - except me. Then I found out that one of the booths that year would be selling vegetables: produce from the various gardens that a lot of parishioners had been tending carefully since before the end of May.

When I heard that, I suddenly knew what I could do: I would grow something and donate that something to sell at the vegetable booth. I had found my contribution, and I was pretty excited about the brilliant idea.

Then reality came crashing in. It turned out there was a reason people had been tending their gardens for six or eight weeks already: It takes that long for a lot of vegetables to mature. I had less than a month to get something from seed to harvest.

I was devastated - until my father intervened and spoke one, saving word: "Radishes."

If you've ever grown radishes, you know that they can be table-ready in as little as 21 days. I was elated. Armed with my grandmother's garden tools and the package of seeds my father bought me, I proceeded to vigorously cultivate about one square foot of our backyard.

In went the seeds; out came the watering can and - miraculously, it seemed - three weeks later, I had a crop of roughly a dozen radishes to donate to my parish's bazaar.

The day the bazaar began, I proudly marched up to an already-bursting vegetable booth with my admittedly meager contribution. As I handed them over to the lovely elderly man running it, I realized that what I had brought paled next to the other, bigger vegetables already in baskets.

That's when the best thing of all happened: He smiled hugely and placed what I had brought right up front.

"Radishes!" he boomed. "Nobody else thought to bring radishes, and it's just what we needed!"

For the next half hour, he told everyone who came by how fortunate the parish was that someone had donated such fine radishes to the annual church bazaar.

And that's why the word "parish" makes me think of radishes. What does the word "parish" make you think of?

(Ms. Winchester is a parishioner of Holy Mother and Child parish in Corinth/Lake Luzerne and a writer for Vermont Catholic magazine.)[[In-content Ad]]