My favorite vegetables are the ones you pluck.
I realized this yesterday as I donned my gardening gloves for the first time in weeks in order to gather up the detritus of the growing season. I gripped the base of tomato plants and tugged until I felt the satisfying release of root balls breaking free of soil. I tore the dried, rattling stalks of snap peas from the trellis and pulled the bolted greens gone to seed. I carried all this to the compost bin.
As I worked, my daughter made a rocket ship of a leaf-bare lilac bush, my spouse mowed the lawn, and my son crawled in the grass through warm patches of autumn sunshine and into the cold shadows of trees.
I was tearing out my disappointments. I was facing the green beans I let spoil, the tomato plants I abandoned to weeks of heat without rain, to wildfire smoke, to early season snowfall. It was not a good year for my garden.
This harvest season, I knew the joy of seeing many projects to completion, but I’d left my garden untended. I couldn’t keep up with the work required to see it through the strange weather.
But yesterday was clear and sunny. I thought about what I could do differently next year, the rain barrels and the drip irrigation system I hoped to install, the new beds I hoped to build, the seeds I hoped to plant. The sunshine warmed my shoulders, and I removed my jacket.
I took a break and leaned back onto the ground beside my children. The grass was dry and scratchy, the sky was bright.
Before we put the garden to bed, I asked my daughter to check on the carrots. She went straight to the delicate, leafy greens and grasped them near the root. She plucked them one by and one and held them up exclaiming over the rainbow of orange, yellow, and purple carrots she harvested. She ran over to the hose and washed one to eat, munching the carrot with the greens still on, like a cartoon bunny.
Watching my daughter’s excitement over a carrot, small miracle that it is, reminded me of Michelle Webster-Hein’s “Beautiful Things” essay, which launched River Teeth’s column of the same name.1 In a section titled “Carrot,” Webster-Hein writes:
“Tonight I peeled and chopped carrots for dinner, tossed them with oil and thyme, oven-roasted them. The simpler the ingredient, the more miraculous it seems to me.
A carrot. What must that have been like, on first discovery? One insistent tug, one long orange tooth slipping upwards. Bright and grubby, sweet. Had I been that cave woman rooting in the dirt, I would have thought anything possible.”
Maybe I hadn’t accomplished all I’d set out to, maybe I’d left some vines to dry, some fruit to spoil, but I’d done this small thing, and I was grateful for the carrots.
For vegetables you pluck. For remembering anything is possible. For all that grows steadily underground, out of sight, gaining size and sweetness.
This week for Ploughshares, I wrote about Lynn Steger Strong’s latest, Flight. The story of three siblings and their families coming together for their first holiday gathering in the aftermath of their mother’s death, this novel shows how messy and chaotic family life can be, yet remains hopeful about its possibilities.
Meanwhile, here are a few other things I’m thinking about . . .
Why do moms love fall so much?
“At the end of one of our hectic summers of ad hoc caregiving and catastrophic weather, we crave quiet and cool the way medieval peasants craved fresh vegetables. It’s not just about the décor. It’s a matter of survival,” writes Kathryn Jezer-Morton.
What does it meant to be “accountable to earth”?
“Imagine what we could do together if our movements were focused on sustainability or, even better, sustenance—that which sustains us, that which answers the cry for care. What if movement’s job were to hone the parental instinct of our species?
…
If we can do that, then perhaps all we have left is to trust that our respite, balm, and collective care will scoop us out of this mess. Or the work of crying will teach us to be so tender with our collective self that we are finally able to mother all that mothers us,” writes adrienne maree brown.
How do we “weed the Ideal Mother™ from the garden bed of our collective understanding of parenting”?
“I feel like in early motherhood, we are set up to fail in so many ways. Especially if we’re socialized as female, many of us are raised to think that becoming a mother is the pinnacle of our achievements as women. It’s supposedly our “natural path” and all that essentialist nonsense. So on the one hand, we’re raised to think motherhood should fulfill us, but on the other hand, we’re given no tools to deal with the massive, emotional, physiological, existential shift of parenthood, right?” writes Sara Petersen.
Michelle Webster-Hein’s new book, Out of Esau, is at the top of my TBR pile.