The garden is letting go
"He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" — Micah 6:8
The garden is letting go and I am letting it.
I went out at six this morning the way I do and I stood at the edge and I looked at it and what I saw was a garden that has done its work. The beans are gone. I pulled the last of them two weeks ago and the row is bare dirt now, which is a strange thing to see in August when everything else is still green. The tomatoes are still coming but they are coming slower. Four this morning, where a month ago there would have been twelve. The cherry tomatoes have slowed to a handful. The zucchini, which I thought would never stop, has stopped.
The peppers are holding. The basil is finished, or close to it. The herbs along the south fence are still there but they have gone woody and tired and they will not give much more. The garden is not dead. It is done. There is a difference between dead and done and the garden knows the difference even if I sometimes forget.
I did not work in the garden this morning. I picked the four tomatoes and I stood there and I looked at it. The morning was cooler than it has been. Not fall. Not yet. But the air had something in it that was not July air and not even early-August air. It was the air of a garden that is finishing, and the air knew it, and the cicadas were quieter than they were last week, and the goldenrod along the road is full now, and everything is telling me the same thing, which is that the season is doing what seasons do.
I will put the garden to bed in September. I will pull the last of the tomatoes and turn the soil and cover the beds and let it rest. My mother understood this, that the ground needs its own kind of sleep the same way a person does, and she was right about that the way she was right about most things. The garden has been awake since April. It has earned its rest.
I carried the four tomatoes inside and set them on the counter. They are the last of the Rutgers, probably. The counter has had tomatoes on it since July and soon it will not, and I will miss them the way I miss everything that goes, which is quietly and without making a fuss about it.
Lord, thank you for the garden that knew when to give and when to stop.
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