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# The zinnias have earned it
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/the-zinnias-have-earned-it/
- Published: 2026-09-09T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-09T09:59:59.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes

*"As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease." — Genesis 8:22*

The garden after Labor Day is a different place than the garden before it.

Nothing happened on Monday. The plants do not know about the holiday. But something in me marks it, and I walked out there this morning with the coffee and looked at it the way you look at a room after the company has gone home.

The beans are finished. I pulled them last week and the trellis is standing there with nothing on it, which always looks like more than it is. The tomatoes are down to what is left, and what is left is coming in slow and small and a little tough-skinned, three or four at a time on the counter instead of a bowlful. That is fine. I have fourteen jars on the shelf and I am not greedy.

The peppers are holding. Peppers always hold. They will go on giving me peppers until something kills them outright, and there is a stubbornness in that I have always admired. The herbs have gone woody and strong, which is when they are best for anything cooked slow.

The zinnias are tired. That is the only way to say it. Still standing, still colored, but tired, the way a person can be upright and dressed and clearly done. I am leaving them. They earned the standing.

I used to grieve this a little. Every September for years there was an afternoon where I stood out here and felt the ending of it and had to go inside. I do not do that anymore, and I am not sure when it stopped. Somewhere in the last few years the garden closing became a thing that happens rather than a thing that happens to me.

Genesis says seedtime and harvest shall not cease. It is God talking to Noah after the water goes down, and I have always thought it is a strange thing to promise a man who has just watched the world end. Not that nothing bad will happen. Just that the order will hold. Seedtime, harvest. Cold, heat. Summer, winter. The wheel keeps turning and you can plan on it.

That is what the tired zinnias are telling me. Not that this is over. That this is September, and September is a spoke on a wheel, and I have been around this wheel seventy-seven times and it has not thrown me yet.

Biscuit came out and lay down in the one warm patch and did not move the whole time I stood there.

*Lord, for the order that holds, thank you.*