Late bloomers
The season of mist and mellow fruitfulness can bear strange fruit.
In early November I picked two Roma plum tomatoes, small red oblongs,
and a palmful of small yellow-green Lillians, both heirloom tomatoes.
I was raking leaves in the yard, a task I dislike. But I tell
myself that the yard will look better when raked, as indeed it
always does. This is a carrot of encouragement for a repetitive
task that always leaves me slightly achy the next day.
The carrots in the garden are long since picked, as is everything
else. Virtually all of the tomatoes and peppers were felled by
early frost and I uprooted them to compost where they once flourished.
Portions of a few plants survived, their downwind sides still
bearing budding fruit not nipped by frost. By November I have
broken myself of the habit of walking daily back to the garden
to admire, water, weed, harvest, talk the plants into growing.
The red Romas startle me amid the gray skeletons of tomato plants.
In September it was impossible to count how many tomatoes hung
ripening amid bushy green. Today I see immediately there are two.
These hardy fruits are a bonus, like something found at the bottom
of a grocery sack believed empty.
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I let go of the tomato season with reluctance because everybody
knows there's only two things that money can't buy, and one of
them is home grown tomatoes. A dozen specimens still linger on
the kitchen counter. I parked most of them there before the first
killing frost, while they were green and perfectly shaped but
immature. Ripened indoors rather than on the vine, they taste
it. They are thick-walled and the flesh is mushy rather than firm,
the tomato cells having absorbed the water they would yield as
juice were this prime time. Despite these imperfections, they're
still better than virtually anything store-bought, which grew
on vines hundreds of miles away and was bred for travel rather
than taste.
Moving leaf heaps, I find a few deep pink impatiens and blue
lobelia, which more even than in summer look neon, standing out
from their autumn-hued surroundings. They are geriatric at this
point in the season but still insist on their colorful birthright.
They are late bloomers, extending the season. All the flowers
left standing pose a question: should I pick them and bring them
indoors for color and protection, these last roses, these leggy
pale yellow snapdragons? Or should I let them continue their beauty
outdoors, where they have thrived all season and given eye's delight?
I decide to let the last blooms lie where they are growing. Nature,
not I, will pluck them soon enough. The season is always longer
than I think. These last summer residents make me think not that
it is possible to overstay one's welcome, for beauty is ever welcome,
but that there is a season to everything.
I accept the universe, said the Trancendentalist American writer
Margaret Fuller in a burst of enthusiasm and mid-19th century
enlightenment, a satori for her in a Victorian and orderly world
in which everything had its place and yoke. Hearing across the
Atlantic of Fuller's acceptance of this inevitable invitation,
her contemporary Thomas Carlyle, realist and esteemed man of letters,
must have nodded dourly over his terse response.
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By god, he said, she'd better.
