Smarter Ardor
  • Blog
  • Smarter Living
  • Homemade Fun
  • About

Rotten on the Vine

7/28/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
After I returned from our weekend away, the garden demanded my attention. A couple of the tomato plants had lurched over into the pea gravel path, obscuring it completely. Some beautiful, ripe tomatoes, had rotted on the vine, as the weight of it dragged them to the ground. I sighed and assessed the situation. It didn’t matter how beautiful they were if they were rotting before they could even be harvested. That morning I gathered as many as I could get to and lugged my bounty back to the house in two large bins.

I roasted two pans of tomatoes with garlic and olive oil, and I made eight cups of mediocre salsa and still had enough to give a basket away and keep a pile on my counter. I thought through how to address the overgrowth. 

Picture
Of course I’m not the first to notice it, but I am struck by how gardening is a metaphor for life, for love. We planted on a bright afternoon with high hopes and piles of chicken poop. We were intentional; we surrounded our tomatoes with basil for nitrogen; we isolated our peppers and root vegetables and guided our pole beans up a trellis; we watered and waited. We’ve had more failure than success. 

When we returned from a week away, I was delighted to see that our bell peppers had finally grown taller, though they were still not producing. The next day, I looked at the small, basil lookalike I had just uprooted and asked Google what sweet pepper plants look like before gently replanting it. Those tall “pepper plants” were actually tall, thriving weeds with shallow roots. I couldn’t believe how easy they were to remove once I identified them, or how sparse that bed looked once they were gone. They were blocking the sun from my tiny pepper plants that, two weeks later, are finally sporting hopeful flowers waiting for pollinating. It may or may not be too late for them.

Anne Lamott says, “The garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things... And what a wonderful relief, every so often, to know who the enemy is—because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph—and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it.”

Sometimes I get busy with the kids, or lazy, or I don’t feel like covering myself from head to toe to protect myself while I toil in the sun, and I let the garden languish. I don’t water; I assume the rain will hold it, assume there couldn’t be that many tomatoes or pole beans to harvest, assure myself my husband can do it later—I can do it later—it will be fine. The work I’ve already done will sustain it.

I’ve cultivated a family: birthed and am raising children; I nurture them and love them, and I work to maintain a marriage and neither are really so unlike gardening. Sometimes I get busy or distracted or lazy or selfish and I let my parenting or my marriage languish. Maybe I don’t ask questions like I really want to know the answers; maybe I don’t listen attentively; maybe I don’t look my husband in the eye; maybe I forget to kiss him like I mean it; maybe I keep my head down on my tasks when I should let them go to sow time into our love. 

In the garden, I’ve found, the longer I stop tending the more hesitant I am to get back to it. We tend the garden in our next door neighbors’ yard, on the other side of the new fence that now has a “neighbor gate.” I can see the tops of my tomato and bean plants peeking over the top. But after a period of neglect, I am reluctant to see the damage that can only be pinned on me. 

Picture
Typically, when I get over there, I am greeted with a garden grown wild. Initially, it seems great—new growth everywhere. But, upon closer inspection, I see the tomato plants have grown so tall they have fallen over on themselves; their fruit so heavy it cannot be supported. The stakes I used before to sure up the plants are still stuck in the soil helplessly; their placement no longer providing assurance that the plant will hold. So beautiful tomatoes hang on the ground, where they meet their demise, by opportunistic insects who did not take the day off, or they rot. Still others ripen perfectly and must be discarded because their time for harvest has passed; it passed while I was busy not tending my garden. 

And I don’t have to tell you, but I will; it’s really not different with love. I have been searching for months for a quote I just know is in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, and I don’t think I’m going to find it. In high school I had it scrawled on an index card in a plastic Quik container I had repurposed to hold my favorite quotes, but now it’s gone and not even Google can help me determine whether it was really The Grapes of Wrath or My Antonia or whether I made it up entirely. One day I’ll reread them both, but for now I will paraphrase:  “No one plants a tree and then just lets it wither and says, ‘I guess it was not meant to be.’ But they do that all the time with their loves.”

So when I am not actively tending to my marriage, ensuring it’s health, dead heading the flowers, trimming back the overgrowth, harvesting the fruit, picking the weeds, and showering it with what it needs, there will be consequences. They may not show immediately; for a while, they may even look like growth. But I want our love to grow up, strong, together— in the confines of the structure we’ve built to support it—not, like my tomatoes, which have entangled themselves with each other, blocking the basil from the light and lunged out of their beds and across the path, making it impassable. I’ve had to discard a regrettable amount of wasted fruit from those plants because they didn’t receive the care they needed. I don’t want to do that with my love.

The garden has reminded me not to wait until needs are emergent and pressing to address them. Water before the ground is parched, trim back overgrowth before it causes trouble to adjacent plants, pull weeds before they choke out the roots, harvest fruit before it rots on the vine.

I walked back into our yard the other day, in jeans and a chambray shirt, sneakers, gloves and baseball cap, drenched in sweat, shears in hand and dragging a 39 gallon bag of overgrowth and rotten tomatoes behind me.  We are eating from our garden or preserving what we can’t eat most days. But the work I did yesterday does not excuse me from working again today—it might  make today’s work lighter, more enjoyable—but I don’t get a pass. I can’t rest on yesterday’s harvest, or the health of the garden yesterday any more than I can remember good times in our marriage and assume they will hold us now or in the future. They won’t—they can’t. I can’t assume my husband will do the jobs I committed to, although sometimes he does. I must accept the risk, when I neglect my garden, that I am putting it all at risk—everything we’ve worked for, how far we’ve come. 

Our garden is a mess. A beautiful, imperfect mess full of all manner of insects and one enormous garden spider that has caused me to abandon at least one tomato for fear of becoming too well acquainted with her. But it’s our mess, and it’s bearing fruit. And it’s provided me with more than pesto, more than the 13 pints of tomatoes I’ve canned, or the sauce in my freezer or the salsa in my fridge. It’s taught me about the importance of daily care, and the consequences of neglect.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Picture

    About Me

    Christina | Virginia Beach
    Psuedo Yankee, city-loving former working mom of four finds herself home with the kids and transplanted to the somewhat Southern suburbs. Finding her feet while still attempting to harness the power of the passion of her youth for useful good.

    Picture

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    March 2020
    February 2020
    March 2019
    January 2019
    August 2018
    April 2018
    November 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011

    Categories

    All
    Anklebiter Anecdotes
    Bendetto
    Careful Feeding
    Charm City
    Complicated Joys
    Family Affairs
    Family Conference
    Festival Of Estrogen
    Grace For Moms
    Help Yourself
    Inanity & Insanity
    Looking Up
    Making It Home
    Mothering Missteps
    Moving Onward
    Music City
    Part Time Lover
    Part-time Lover
    Part-time Lover
    Soapbox
    Stumblings
    Su Casa
    The Village
    This City Life
    Wanderings
    Wifedom
    Worklife

    Links

    Grace for Moms

    MOPS International's Blog

    Amber Hudler

    Smarter Ardor.
    Copyright © 2011-2018.
    All Rights Reserved.
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photos from lungstruck, Orin Zebest, yaquina, warrenski, Jing a Ling, The Shopping Sherpa, Sir, Rony, orangeacid, adrianvfloyd, SierraTierra, benjaflynn, Homeandgardners, eye's eye, katerha, LivingOS, wolfB1958, andyarthur, Jeremiah Ro, alextorrenegra, ShironekoEuro, mabahamo, iMorpheus, openuser, kamshots, nickHiebert, VinothChandar, Yashna M, mike138, Dougtone, cogdogblog, x1klima