Tonight was the first meeting of Glastonbury Partners in Planting's board of trustees since June. In with all of the project updates and other business of the board I learned something really special.

Last month I wrote about a thank you letter we received for our work at Knox Lane, a housing complex run by the Glastonbury Housing Authority. Part of our work there has been placing trios of large planters in each of the four clusters of houses. We covered the cost of the planters and the plants, and arranged a day for our volunteers to plant the plants (annual flowers and such) in the planters alongside the residents.

Della, our past president, who is leading the planters part of the project, told us about one of the Knox lane residents. This woman is in her mid-forties, and suffers from MS. She's confined to a wheelchair, and had told some of her fellow residents that she thought she would never be able to garden again. One of the reason we chose planters over planting beds is that they're up a couple of feet off the ground -- an ideal height for an elderly person with limited mobility to work on them. Or a middle-aged woman with MS. She has taken ownership of the planters in her area; tending them, dead-heading gone-by flowers, and by the accounts of the housing staff, really blossoming herself.

On this sad day, when so much of our attention has been focused on death and loss, all of us at the meeting agreed that the entire project was worth it just to hear this one story. Plants are life. Sometimes when you tend a garden, you grow a harvest of hope too.