Make Your Dreams Come True

by Mrs. A. J. Wilder.

Now is the time to make garden! Anyone can be a successful gardener at this time of year and I know of no pleasanter occupation these cold, snowy days, than to sit warm and snug by the fire making garden with a pencil, in a seed catalog. What perfect vegetables we do raise in that way and so many of them! Our radishes are crisp and sweet, our lettuce tender and our tomatoes smooth and beautifully colored. Best of all, there is not a bug or worm in the whole garden and the work is so easily done.

In imagination we see the plants in our spring garden, all in straight, thrifty rows with the fruits of each plant and vine numerous and beautiful as the pictures before us. How near the real garden of next summer approaches the ideal garden of our winter fancies depends upon how practically we dream and how we work.

It is so much easier to plan than it is to accomplish. When I started my small flock of Leghorns a few years ago, a friend inquired as to the profits of the flock and, taking my accounts as a basis, he figured I would be a millionaire within five years. The five years are past, but alas, I am still obliged to be economical. there was nothing wrong with my friend's figuring, except that he left out the word "if" and that made all the difference between profits figured out on paper and those worked out by actual experience.

My Leghorns would have made me a millionaire—if the hens had performed according to schedule; if the hawks had loved field mice better than spring chickens; if I had been so constituted that I never became weary; if prices—but why enumerate? Because allowance for that word "if" was not made in the figuring, the whole result was wrong.

It is necessary that we dream now and then. No one ever achieved anything, from the smallest object to the greatest, unless the dream was dreamed first, yet those who stop at dreaming never accomplish anything. We must first see the vision in order to realize it; we must have the ideal or we cannot approach it; but when once the dream is dreamed it is time to wake up and "get busy." We must "do great deeds; not dream them all day long."

The dream is only the beginning. We'd starve to death if we went no further with that garden than making it by the fire in the seed catalog. It takes judgment to plant the seeds at the right time, in the right place, and hard digging to make them grow, whether in the vegetable garden or in the garden of our lives. The old proverb says, "God helps the man who helps himself," and I know that success in our undertakings can be made into a habit.

We can work our dreams out into realities if we try, but we must be willing to make the effort. Things that seem easy of accomplishment in dreams require a good common sense to put on a working basis and a great deal of energy to put thru to a successful end. When we make our dream gardens we must take into account the hot sun and the blisters on our hand; we must make allowance for and guard against the "ifs" so that when the time to work has come they will not be of so much importance.

We may dream those dreams of a farm of our own; of a comfortable home; of that education we are going to have and those still more excellent dreams of the brotherhood of man and liberty and justice for all; then let us work to make this "the land where dreams come true."

Mrs. A. J. Wilder. "Make Your Dreams Come True." Missouri Ruralist,  (February 5, 1918): pages 12-13.  CLICK HERE to see this article as it originally appeared in the Missouri Ruralist.

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