Column: Spirituality, NPK

We weren’t served by an ice cream truck in the neighborhood where I grew up. It was a brand-new subdivision outside of city limits, and I guess there weren’t enough potential customers to make a route profitable. But we did have a beloved Sno-Cone lady who drove along our street sometimes. Looking back with a grown-up gaze, I see now that it must’ve been her hobby. She can’t have grossed more than a couple of bucks, even if she sold a cone to every kid in miles. But I’m grateful, because she gave me a touchstone memory of my childhood summers. Interestingly, it’s not one I’d categorize as taste or temperature, but as color.

At the distant sound of the Sno-Cone lady’s bell, I’d dash into the house for a dime and sprint to meet her. In the bed of her pickup truck, she had a cooler full of shaved ice, a stack of paper cones and six bottles of colored syrup. Yel- low was lemon, orange was orange, red was raspberry, purple was grape, brown was root beer and blue was blue.

Really, blue. That’s all we ever called it, and all I ever asked for: an electric, shocking blue.

I’m bemused to meet that blue again in Miracle-Gro All Purpose Plant Food. The cheerful yellow and bright green box offers no clue to what’s inside: a powder colored so chemical a shade it appears nowhere in nature. It doesn’t look like it would produce miracles of growth; it looks like plants should shrink from it, screaming.

For a bunch of reasons I believe are sound, I prefer organic fertilizers. But when I bought a house, the previous owners left a box of Miracle-Gro in the garage. The best way to dispose of what otherwise would be household hazardous waste is to use it up in accordance with directions. So whenever my Boston fern (Nephrolepis exaltata) yellows because it’s sucked all the nitrogen from the potting mix, I give it an artificially blue drink, and that greens it right up.

There’s a correspondence and coherence here I can hardly explain to myself, but I know when I let myself get too contained, the livelier parts of my living fade. It’s like I’ve used up the available nutrients, and I need some fertilizer. Not nitrogen (N) for green leaves, phosphorus (P) for root development, and potassium (K) for flowering and fruiting, but qualities I could call NPK, nevertheless.

I need what’s New in the diet of my days. With a portion of Possibility, a hope ready to risk faith that things can be better. Stirred together into a solution of Knowing myself. And if this has a color — which it seems to — it’s the color of a Sno-Cone from my childhood ... the color of world enough and time, wrapped in an infinity of playful afternoons.

The Reverend Doug Job does interim ministry for congregations in transition and keeps good memories and friends made while serving a church in Cape. At present, he hangs his fern in Hannibal, Mo. You may hang with him in email, anyway at revdarkwater@gmail.com.