devotional

Everything is ripe

Ruby Hayes

— 2 min read
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Watercolor of a garden row at dawn with dew-covered tomato vines heavy with ripe fruit, a dirt path between stakes, and misty hills in the distance.

"Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap steadfast love; break up your fallow ground." — Hosea 10:12

Everything is ripe at the same time and nobody asked me if I was ready.

I went out at six this morning because six is the window. By eight the heat has settled in and the garden belongs to the sun and I am back inside with the door shut and the fan running. But at six the light is long and the dew is still on the leaves and the work is possible.

The Rutgers are coming in faster than I can process them. I picked nine this morning and left four on the vine because I do not have counter space for thirteen more tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes have gone past any pretense of management. I eat them in the garden, standing between the rows, warm from the vine, and I do not feel guilty about it because there are more than I could eat in a week.

The beans are slowing. I can feel it in the way the pods are thinner than they were two weeks ago, the way the plants have started to look tired around the edges. Beans know when they are done and they do not pretend otherwise. The zucchini does not know this. The zucchini will produce until the first frost or until I pull it out of the ground, whichever comes first, and I have thought about pulling it out more than once this week.

The cicadas started last week and they are loud this morning, the steady sound that means August the way peepers mean spring. I stood in the row between the tomatoes and the peppers and I listened to them and I did not do anything for a minute. Just stood there. The garden was doing its work and I was standing in the middle of it and the morning was as close to perfect as a morning gets in the first week of August.

I am tired. Not the bad tired. The tired that comes from a garden that has given more than you asked for and is not finished giving. My back knows what the calendar says even when I do not look at it. My knees have opinions about the kneeling that I did not ask for. But the tomatoes are on the counter and the beans are in the colander and there will be more tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, until the garden decides it is done.

Lord, I did not plant more than I could carry. You did. And it is good.