Autumn Gardening And Poem

by Ann
(Minneapolis, MN, USA)

Autumn is the season when I can finally relax. The bustle of summer work ... classes, little league games, day camp, community projects, home repairs ... subsides and my neglected garden beckons. How patiently it waits for me each year!

The bushes do their best to become trees. The perennials sprawl. And, always, something grows unbidden that surprises and delights me when I finally find it.

This year a tomato vine sprouted from a bit of compost we used to fill the gap along the new driveway. It wended its way between the phlox, concealed until this week when we spotted a softball-sized fruit hanging incongruously from a hollyhock plant. It looks like an Arkansas Traveler, with promisingly rounded shoulders and ribbed sides, but I have no way to know its parentage. I had ten varieties growing in the tomato bed last year.

My gardening day is coming, but is not here yet. It's not cold enough. It's too sunny. Mad dogs and Englishwomen are out in the rain; that's my annual ritual.

Canada will comply in a few weeks, sending that first real cold front of the season southward while the Gulf of Mexico is still pumping heat and humidity north. They'll meet somewhere near my backyard and the race between me and winter will be on.

Last fall, we confronted each other in October. My tomato vines were as ugly as possible by then, straggly and blight-ridden, and chock full of fruit too promising to pick earlier. The day started out hot and sticky. But the forecast included a hard freeze within 36 hours, and steady rain in between.

Perfect! The dog and I headed out dressed for summer: jeans and a t-shirt for me, hair falling out in clumps for him. He's a Norwegian elkhound. The breed sheds explosively from April through frost, then puts on a coat thick enough to find twenty below cozy.

Sigbjorn doubted my timing at first, giving me that quizzical dog look for Are you Kidding? But the lure of the suddenly unfenced tomato bed, and all of that prime digging dirt overpowered his desire to stay out of the heat. We pounced on the vines (literally, in his case), picking and packing fruit with speed born of many years' practice.

I sorted the tomatoes by likelihood: ripening (coloring already, future salad), may ripen (deep green, slight give when pressed, sauce or fried green tomatoes) and dog toy (tennis ball substitute). By now, the skies had darkened and the wind had stilled. We could smell the rain coming.

Autumn Leaves Poem

Summer rain smells of ozone and green.
Fall rain smells of color briefly seen.
That blaze of yellow, orange and red,
my sons will sometimes rake to a bed,
then contemplating this transient toy,
Will circle 'fore leaping in no-house-rules joy.

As it began to drizzle, I moved on to the perennials, digging, dividing and replanting first the front beds, then the back. It was raining steadily by the time I reached the last bed in the backyard, my canine buddy relishing each and every subtracted degree. His fur gleamed with rain that could not penetrate his double coat.

I, however, had already soaked two rain slickers and given up, preferring freedom of movement to semi-dryness. I was digging new holes for the last daylily when my next door neighbor came up the easement drive.

"Ann," he said with a note of concern, "it's pouring. Why are you gardening in this weather?"

"Yes, Mike," I replied, grinning. "I know. Isn't it beautiful out?"