Deep in summer, some things thrive.
A sunflower towers over the site. Testing the stability of the thick stalk, I fantasize about climbing.
Then I consider Giants. I pass.
Not all the corn stalks, but one has a node higher than the peak of all the others. One zucchini has leave the size of hubcaps and a spread twice its peers.
Some struggle and some are fine. But those other extremes, the fantasy of their seemingly limitless potential, I slip into a trance.
I lose time.
As bunches of small white flowers fade, the berries grow.
Small green balls become bulbous.
Branches bend low, prostrating themselves to bring the reddening bunches to picking level.
As the bunches verge on popping, peaking at a deep purple, it is time to pick. Fast. Within a couple days they will leak, and be too soft to handle. At that point, with the lightest touch, they fall off the bush. A pervasive smell of rot.
Clip clusters and store in the freezer to make picking easier. Every spare soup container is drafted into service and the freezer becomes a live action game of Tetris.
Bake into muffins. Melt into jam. Dehydrate for use later.
Fickle little berries that come in droves. Tasty, useful, for a couple weeks all consuming of my life.
Cyanide poisoning side effects:
nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, seizures, death.
With an incantation and a few hundred degrees:
a delicious and harmless fruit for baking, jams, and sauces.
In a pot an equal weight of berries and sugar, one must make an acidic cut with lemon juice. Add fire and the berries shrink; juice escapes. It bubbles and foams to three times the depth; a nice light purple glow. Then recedes and darkens. Harm gone, let it thicken, but not burn. Jar with the remnants of the berry seeds and skin: crunch.
Bake rather than boil? Scatter through muffins or fold into sourdough. Some berries burst just in the folds while others explode in the coagulation, dyeing stretches of the bread. Slices reveal deep purple splotches; sweet patches in each bite. Zhuzh it up with melted Havarti and a dollop of elderberry jam.
Threat converted to a delicious opportunity.
A rare sight: Maren up on the deck rail, scanning the site, on high alert. Suddenly a swing off one trellis shaft to another, transitioning into a swift descent, and she is back out of sight.
A pole away, a wide eyed Sola is frantically twisting her head back and forth. This isn’t a sentry on lookout, this is the active search that comes only after the alert from a disturbance. The exhausting review lasts only moments before she bounds off, two ollas over. A sudden stop and the frantic scan left and right restarts.
Exasperated, her head freezes then slowly starts a scan of the sky then down to the site perimeter’s fenceline. Conclusion reached, she takes off in a sprint back towards where she came. Then beyond. A singular focus: it’s a beeline towards the door. With a heave, a gust, and a hiss it opens up and she is gone.
It’s not just the fairies. The normal sound of sparrows, cardinals, and robins scavenging has vanished. The site is quiet.
Charlie is the last to leave, making for the neighbor’s porch. Tail puffed up. It is not a sprint. Charlie doesn’t sprint, but moves with more hustle than when she is on the prowl.
A site in motion, now abandoned.
Source: Unclear.
I feel lost.
Time and place shifted beneath me.
My eyes burn. Every breath is a strain.
Heat. Humidity. Smoke and a smell of burning.
Not the neighbor enjoying a summer night burger on the grill to avoid heat in the kitchen. A burning that screams danger, that mutes the sun to a glow. A haze that envelops everything on plot 17 and reduces the sight of what lies beyond its borders.
I think locally:
A canister at a time I water the plants and rinse their leaves. I check and refill the ollas.
I look for disturbances.
Something behind the smoke.
Something different that reveals this isn’t my home. Isn’t my timeline.
I don’t find Sola. I don’t even hope to spot Maren. Inconspicuous on a normal day, invisible in this context.
Thick air slows everything. Emptying my entire reserve results in a sluggish slide through the sun to collapse into the shade. For days on end a breeze fails to break through.
Every day, dawn to dusk, the site is being relentlessly baked. I empty one water barrel, then the other, trying to keep up the reserves. Roots that have stretched near the ollas seem satiated. Others, lacking that maturity, struggle. As the sun finally sets, I top those off with a deep drenching.
In this heat, I still don’t spot Sola. Touring the gardens in the evening, a couple of covers have been disturbed. Something has gotten in for a drink.
Have the fairies dealt with that intrusion, preserving my garden’s right to this chilling relief, or has the system broken?
I top off the bird bath.
I set out a water tray for the squirrels and any kits.
We all need this relief, but an order must be maintained to align these interests. Yours, mine, the plants. Systems require management.
I never saw what was here before. Upon my arrival a few years ago the plot was all gangly turf and weeds, with this small island of bark in the middle. Plain, waiting for direction. I planted the foxtail lily and bee balm. Supported the milkweed and blue vervain. As they took hold, the bark area has slowly sunk.
I ponder what was as I sit in the shade. The weight of the humidity, the anxious prairie for any breeze encourages unfocused imagination. Dreaming.
I picture what was once a large tree. The entire site was cast in a cave-like shadow. Little else grew. A place that felt hidden. Invisible.
The tree’s removal could have only been a couple years before me. Conversion of a shady cavity to an open space with potential, completely altering the spirit of the site. Or maybe reclaiming it.
I was predestined to garden here.
Saturday morning, the humidity persists. Allocating time to shake things up, I set out the tools and an iced water bottle.
Compost piles are filled gradually, layer by layer, but that stratified site history can’t be preserved. Turning speeds decomposition and hastens the nutrient return. There be black gold in that cage.
I begin by removing the top. As I toss aside stalks that are slow to decompose: a sharp pain on my finger.
A new threat is present, lashing out from where I don’t suspect. I think thorn. My brain then says but why. Eyes confirm, no thorn.
A yellow jacket struggles, stinger planted. Unable to extricate itself. Flailing. I look down at the compost and now see fifteen, twenty yellow jackets crawling over the top. By dumb luck I didn’t dig into the burrow, just upset the edges. I back away to remove the stinger, to ice. Thankful to escape with only one hit.
A few days later, across the plot, I spot a nest that is less hidden. Under the garage overhang a powerful queen has her colony hard at work. Twelve, sixteen paper wasps cover the combs, encasing new larvae.
I stare dumbstruck.
Multiple new entities have staked their claim.
My efforts feel like they are becoming boxed in.
Since the start of the smoke, the fairies have been on lockdown. Peering out from the doors at dawn. Checking the surroundings. Then battening down.
Water management necessitates controls for when things are good and augmentations when it gets dry. Defense drops back to the deeper reservoirs, closer to the doors, where lids are checked morning and night to maintain the reserves. Scavengers are allowed the short, perimeter ollas: more puddle than pond. Key ones garner a strong presence and regular review.
Within the smoke, there is more movement. Maren and Sola have support. More eyes that peer out from beneath the door. While they inspect, the additional watchers monitor for movement.
Old warnings are placed atop certain stores.
Signs not seen in decades.
The face a warning that only trouble waits for you here.
Rampaging across a patch and up a trellis: a pumpkin vine thrives.
And then, it turns yellow. Wilts.
I squish a couple of squash bugs, but find no sign of eggs. I tenderly search the base of the vine for soft spots, the signals of a borer. No spots give away the threat. Surgery is off the table. With no opportunity for recovery, I must accept defeat. Remove the sorry remains of the vine. To prevent the threat from lingering, to not sully my compost, I bag it.
All my hopes now rest on one pumpkin across the site. An inordinate amount of water is dedicated. Careful hours are spent searching the vine for squashbugs. For the tell tale little red triangle of eggs. Whatever is necessary so this part of the plan succeeds.
But a voice in the back of my mind wonders:
Is this the threat I should be looking for?
The lack of borers and eggs on the other vine gnaws at me. Like a borer would.
Am I sure that this was a common threat and not something more targeted?
I nurse the one ripening fruit. I search the vine, the ground, and the site for signals. The lack is discomforting.
Something roams in the night.
Where there were twelve corn stalks there are now eleven: one has been knee capped, folded over. Hidden by the night, two sharp bites gouged out the stalk inches above the ground. The rest isn’t consumed, or even scratched. Whatever came, this limb wasn’t to its taste. Was it possibly too chewy?
A few days later, across the site, a butternut squash is missing a big bite. Just one. Like I might bite the bulge of a pear. But I wouldn’t stop at one. This was a tasting of a more gamey appendage, but still it wasn’t right. Too soft possibly, lacking a bold, rich, savory flavor?
I lie on the patio furniture and read.
But only until predusk.
Then I secure the green house.
Lock the house doors.
Set the window stops.
Whatever comes at night is still searching. I fear for what flavor it hungers.
The feel of its chaw.
The cold of its teeth’s penetration.
The smack of its satisfaction.
Flowers recede, leaves brown. What’s left wilts until I almost don’t remember something is hidden here.
It takes a day to exhume April’s four shallow pits. Digging carefully from the edges to avoid damage, but still… one is sliced. A deep cut by the shovel's edge.
Sifting carefully through each shovel full, the small golden treasures are preserved in brown paper bags.
Shovel by shovel I have to accept that the results are, admittedly, underwhelming. A fingerling is not what was planted, but abnormally hot, dry weeks have tamped down expectations. Heaps of gold have been revealed as a mirage.
Most come inside to be sliced for a few campfire meals. The truly small ones and those damaged by wayward slices are reburied.
The cycle renews.
High hopes for the fall.
The ground continues to harden and crack. The green of tomato leaves lighten while the edges burn yellow. Production slows.
It’s not just plants that suffer in extreme heat under fourteen hours of relentless sun. Sola’s smile remains frozen, but the relaxed act has vanished. After multiple nights of disturbed olla lids, she is on high alert. Expectations raised. Orders sharper. A rondel dagger is now a permanent extension of her right hand. Any approach on the central ollas has her in motion.
Tension ripples through the site.
Something has to give.
Then one day, a new well spring sprouts. A wide dish, slightly dug in. A small solar power spout. It doesn’t solve the drought, but a central watering hole adds some frolic.
Shoulders relax.
The rustle of small movements.
Brief dalliances into the sun.
To snack. To drink.
A kit hides among the wild flowers. At a size where it’s critical to stay hidden.
Aware of the dangers: the predators and those it hasn’t yet classified.
It needs another week, maybe two to reach the next tier.
A safer size that minimizes some of the threats.
Could this be the new caretaker? It is unclear that a selection has been made. Care and tentativeness are necessary for survival at this stage. The question is whether it converts to what the site needs.
Guidance.
Mediation.
Decisiveness.
Recorded Here
for the Unlucky
The fairies of Plot 17 watch over this record.
Would be thieves: they will know.
Your produce rots by morning.
Dreams of horrors you can't name.
You leave home and walk in circles:
close enough to see where you're going,
never arriving.