Seeking to reap what I sowed

I must have been four or five years old at the time.  It could not have been before May of 1989, because I remember we were still in our old house before it was destroyed by the torrential hailstorm on St. Constantine's Day.  We had a fairly large courtyard adjacent to our house where we didn't plant much, as I remember, because nothing seemed to grow there.  I didn't know this, or at least didn't grasp it at the time.  I am jumping to this conclusion now, as I consider it in retrospect.

I didn't know a lot of things as a child.  I was unaware of this ignorance, yet I was very curious and always did things and took initiative without consulting anybody beforehand.  One day, I took a garden hoe and started tilling the land in the aforementioned courtyard, as much as I felt was necessary, or as much as I could, given my age and size.  Then I took handfuls of sugar from the azure box in which we used to keep it for everyday use and sowed it, hoping that one day, in the near future, it would sprout, bloom, and produce more sugar that I could then enjoy in any way I pleased.

In my simple mind or blatant ignorance I was confident and boastful of this, which, to my chagrin, ended up haunting me when word spread and everybody around town kept asking me, 'has the sugar sprouted yet?'  It was an embarrassment for a long time thereafter, especially once I learned—from adults and from a disappointing lack of crop—that things like this did not happen.  I have outgrown that shame and for the first time I am unabashedly admitting to having undertaken this silly venture.  That is not why I write today.

I write instead in remembrance of things past, be they the barren fruit of ignorance or naïveté, or merely happy memories reaching me from a happy past that I have, in vain, sought to recapture for the latter half of my life; I write in support of future ventures, be they pursued by my heart or mind, and I toss aside my pride, my better reason, maturity, and a coterie of other checks and balances, and, simultaneously, commit myself to finding a happiness I once had before the waves of years settled with a crash on my shoulders; I commit myself to reaping the sugar I once sowed.

I don't know yet what this means....