November

This garden rises every year in the same place. The green plants of the current season take root in the same brown dirt as the many gardens of the past. Eventually though, this year's population will cease growing and sink, some gracefully, some more awkward and indecorous, back into the same brown soil that seems to wait, docile and quiet, outside of my windows for the winter to pass.

I try to keep the garden orderly. I rearrange seeds into rows and tie things up onto poles and such, but the plants have a mind of their own. Though I have new ideas about locations, they seem to remember themselves from the past year and go about looking as they did in the previous growing season, a notion we humans have some affinity for as well, I have noticed. Though we transform and advance in stages to fruition, we want to go back to the previous flowering version of ourselves.

The tomatoes are strictly patrolled; I execute search and seizure operations to find the little vagrants wherever they pop up and silently set down roots. Just what they think they are doing is beyond me. It may be that other neighborhoods of the garden are more racially diverse, more cultured, less leafy or more upwardly mobile. Perhaps they want to hobnob with the eggplants in their purple robes or fling themselves at the basil in a frenzy of Mediterranean passion. That may be what they are up to; in the end though, I win as a rule. They go back home with their own kind and mature.

Some of the plants are more romantic than others. I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell them I said that. They are very competitive for the attention of their care-taker. I often hear them whisper about me as I weave down the rows weeding or pruning. Of course, when I turn around, no one is saying anything but that doesn’t fool me. The tall, slender flowering pea vines are dancing in twilight breezes tonight looking for all the world like blue moths drifting in and out of a party. Sometimes, I hear their silvery laughter on the wind and swear they are gossiping about the goings on in this social season.

Speaking of parties, indeed, there was the evening I entered the garden to pick vegetables in a humid, warm dusk, the preferred light and weather for their solemnities. I was suddenly made aware of movement and saw a definite glinting and glowing going on. I had the distinct intuition that I had stumbled onto (or been allowed to witness) a very private ceremonial. Perhaps it was the angle of the vanishing light, or the refraction from droplets rained in a light shower that had just fallen, but that garden shimmered as if it were Oz. Nothing will ever convince me I had not intruded on rites of the fairy tribe. Though my human vision was a great inadequacy, I could see their glimmering presence. They were frolicking up and down the rows with no thought of the rules I impose in the daylight.

Who can explain the waning and waxing of this same garden for thirty years? The more my life changes around it, the more the garden stays the same. I have photographed it each year and I can prove what I am saying. There are always the same brave green flags of spinach, the brilliant red globes of beets lighting the air around them, the green fingers of beans reaching for earth and the tall red lamps of Swiss chard nodding and waving in the breeze. They rise from the soil each morning as the dawn finds them, constant companions of mine. There, in the photographs, the same intent tomato faces look back at me year after year. I am in some of the pictures too and while, over a short period of years, I offered the same face to the lens, I have begun to ripen and the harvest is not impossible to imagine anymore.

The year will come when this garden rises eagerly, but I will be no where in sight. It snowed for the first time today.


CYNTHIA FRASER GRAVES
Cynthia Fraser Graves is the author of "Eyes Like Jewels" and "Dusk on Route One." Her new book, "Never Count Crow: Love and Loss in Kennebunk, Maine" will be published in April 2007. The author lives and writes in Kennebunk, Maine. For more information or permission to reprint this story, email info@springboardpromotions.net.

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