Devoted

Up here, (in both latitude and altitude,) it takes a long time for summer to heat up. By the time the frost stops creeping in, we have only a dozen weeks or so before it's back again; the time of tall fields and heavy zucchini plants exhausted by their bright yellow offerings is short, and it arrives late.

Now, as summer's relentless sun falls below the horizon a little earlier each night, each green thing growing in our yard - the corn ears just starting, the last lingering peas, the kale that appear to have reached some sort of homeostatis - becomes more noteworthy.

Last night, there was frost on the ground. Soon, our bright garden will be buried under the browns of compost and manure, and then by a blanket of white that will keep it out of sight until at least next April.

I'm ready. Coming from San Francisco where the summers are cool and often overcast by the fog, I find myself far more unaccustomed to the sun than I expected. While I love the endless hot days, they sap my energy, as does the smoke that's been blowing in from Idaho, obscuring our mountains in a dry and heavy fog of another sort.

On the way to dinner at a friend's last week, we drove by a garden, really a small farm, so picturesque with its stalks of sunflowers and hollyhock and overflowing beds of greens that it's impossible to imagine it in any other state but blooming, and Stella remarked, "look at that pretty little garden."
 
"It is so pretty, but not so little," I said. "A garden like that takes a lot of time."

"You know, mom, next summer you should devote yourself to plants. That would be so wonderful, wouldn't it?"