The state I would call honest

Ruby Hayes

— 2 min read
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Watercolor of a late-September vegetable garden, bean vines gone brown on poles, squash leaves going pale, green tomatoes on stakes, marigolds still bright at one end.

"You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness." — Psalm 65:11

The garden this morning is in the state I would call honest.

Nothing out there is pretending. The bean vines are brown string on the poles. The squash gave out weeks ago and left those big ragged leaves going pale and papery at the edges, and the whole row has a smell to it now, not bad, just finished. The peppers are still going because peppers do not know when to quit. And the marigolds I put in along the end are as loud as they were in July, which strikes me every year as slightly unfair to everything else.

I am not going to pull anything yet. This is the week I walk out and look and decide what order to do it in, and then do none of it.

Henry Beale came by on his way to town and stood at the fence a minute and said, Well, Ruby, it's about that time. I said it was. He said he'd already taken his beans down and I said I hadn't, and he said that was the difference between us, and drove on. He is not wrong.

There are eleven green tomatoes on the vines that are not going to ripen. I counted them a week ago and decided to leave them and I have left them. They are exactly where they were. I go out and look at them like a woman checking on a decision.

The psalm says you crown the year with your bounty. I have always heard crown as the top of the year, the peak, August, everything coming in at once faster than you can put it up. Fourteen jars on the counter and the kitchen too hot to stand in.

But a crown sits on the end of a thing. It goes on last. It is not the middle of the reign, it is the head of it.

Maybe the crown of the year is not July. Maybe it is this — a garden that did what it was for, going quiet in good order, with somebody standing at the edge of it in a sweater who is in no hurry to tear it out.

The wagon tracks overflow with richness. I would like the record to show that my wagon tracks are mostly mud and a wheelbarrow with a slow leak in the tire.

But the beans were good this year. And I put up fourteen jars. And the marigolds are still going, and there is no reason for them to be, and nobody asked them to.

Thank you for the end of it as much as the middle.