This weekend marked the start of fall. As the gardening season comes to a close, choices must be made:
Pull out the tomato vines now and say goodbye to the whole blighty season, or keep cutting off diseased bits and dead branches in order to keep the last little fruits ripening? Let the corn keep ripening and fattening, though the critters might start to attack it, or harvest it now and take what we get? Tear out the powder-coated bergamot plants that still haven’t flowered, or keep hoping they might still bloom?
And critically: How much of the planet should the pumpkin vine be allowed to colonize—just my yard, the neighborhood, our whole nation? Do the pollinators need those big pumpkin flowers, or do the pumpkins need me to cut them off so all the plant energy goes into ripening? At exactly what stage does a pumpkin today have hope of being ripe before frost hits?
“Kill your darlings!” the writing experts always say. As I work my day down thirty-foot-long vines, I spy darling fruits the size of chickpeas, the size of badminton balls with a tail of flower still attached, tennis balls, kid-size soccer balls, and then, too, decidedly pumpkin-shaped pumpkins.
I should go inside already, I think. I should have had lunch thirty minutes ago. My work is waiting for me upstairs, and the day is ticking along. Soon it will be over. Soon it will be dark. Soon you’ll be older and what if the work isn’t finished? I’m tired of working on my book revisions. But I’m determined to finish this book. A little voice whispers: should you give up on it? Move on to the next one? I hate, but cannot help, that sometimes I think about how many books I can write in the amount of life I might have left to live. I should hurry, finish this book now! And yet: the Earth will spin at its own rhythm, and this garden to which I’m committed needs work now, too.
Yesterday was Yom Kippur. Who shall live and who shall die? Who by ripe old age, and who by virtue of starting too late? Who by disease, and who by gardener’s cold calculations?
I cut and cut and cut away vine, hoping to give my half-dozen pumpkin-shaped pumpkins the best chance of ripening. As I cut, I uncover other plants, like the bergamot and zinnias I’d imagined growing up elegantly between the vines. Ha! Editing is the process of cutting away what isn’t needed for isn’t good for the ultimate health and glory of the rest, right? But I’m astounded at how many new shoots there are. I keep finding new ones — I think because when I cut off one growing tip (as my guides suggest I should) a new starts out elsewhere. The pumpkin vine is a fierce, fearless, indefatigable plant.
But it’s so hard to just toss those would-be pumpkinlets onto the compost pile. It isn’t their fault they were late bloomers and started so far down the vine!
So I’m bringing them inside, like a loony, and making floral arrangements with them. (Waste not, want not) And inside, with just a glass of water and no roots or soil or rest-of-the-plant, the vine still grows. It stretches its big leaf-fingers up, tip-toes its tendrils along the surface of the table, and keeps on growing, oblivious to the impossibility of its efforts, the inevitability of its failure.
