Sometimes Love Looks Like a Potato

Some fragmented thoughts on an unexpected early-morning harvest

Thursday, July 3
Grand Rapids, Mich.

I’d started and mostly finished a letter for this week, but something about it felt off. It was angrier than my dispatches tend to be, and while anger isn’t inherently bad (or good), there’s a difference between thoughtful, purposeful anger and anger that simply gets shouted for the sake of shouting.

I went to the garden to harvest some lettuce and some new potatoes this morning, and I dug this little wonder up.

When I dig potatoes, I always feel the happy anticipation of meals to come (in this case, potato salad). But this one— Amid my own personal angst and the significant woes of the wider world, this potato felt like a tiny, tuberous reminder of love.

All I really have to say to you today is this: Remember that you’re loved. And that love, along with all its accompanying goodness, isn’t something to be hoarded or held apart. This balm like no other is to be shared as lavishly as we can.

So hug your babies. Text a friend. Scribble a note to a person who could use some encouragement. Pick (or buy) yourself a bouquet of flowers—and then one for another who would be delighted by the beauty. Make a donation. Call your legislators. Send up a prayer. Share a poem. Lend an ear or a shoulder or a hand of solidarity. Cook an extra meal and deliver it. Give the dog an extra treat. Whisper a gratuitous word of appreciation. Surprise someone with your grace.

“What will survive of us is love,” Philip Larkin wrote in his famed poem “An Arundel Tomb.” He didn’t mean it in a saccharine way at all; just read and contemplate the poem, which is quite a journey. I don’t quote it in a saccharine way at all either. Amid the complexity of life (and death), I think that love can surprise us, if we’re open to it, in the giving and the receiving, in all different shapes and all different forms, expected and not.

Sometimes it might even look like a potato.

🫶

Jeff