2024 Untaming Our Garden

 

 

Untaming Our Garden

By Kelsey Blair

 

You cleaned up the mess the day before you left.

The pumpkin we planted midsummer had taken over the yard, betraying the confines of its container and crawling three different ways through the manicured grass. Deceptively strong tendrils slithered their smooth, green spines into the soil below. 

The dogs had carved a well-worn path past the raised garden beds and over one stem, snapping the gigantic, fuzzy leaves from their life source, leaving them limp and tattered like wayward umbrellas carried away and tossed by a storm.

Then came the infestation. Squash bugs everywhere, multiplying on leaves–yellow, shrunk, and shriveled leaves–no match for the sweltering Kentucky sun.

You decided it was time. You took a hatchet to the hollow stems. You ripped the tendrils from the clay. What was once vibrant and fast-growing had become muted and weak.

Despite the plant’s impairment, it still produced a perfectly oval pumpkin, just as big as the ones you’d find at a farmer’s roadside stand. 

You wiped your hands clean and leaned the shovel against the patio. Before you left, you placed the pumpkin—perfectly orange on one side, underripe green on the other—on the stoop by my front door. 

* * *

I posted the pumpkin on a neighborhood forum. “Curb alert: Perfectly good pumpkin free to good home.” Someone else would enjoy it in a way I could not, someone unaware of the memories stored within it.

The shovel remained exactly where you left it. I couldn’t bear to touch it. Seasons changed. The neighbor’s gigantic maple tree molted its crunchy brown leaves, dancing down to eclipse the rusted blade.

You reached out on Halloween, said you’d seen a girl in a French fry costume that wasn’t nearly as good as the one I’d fashioned out of a cardboard box and pool noodles that one year. I sat in my driveway alone with a bucket of candy, enveloped in smoke from a fire I couldn’t keep going.

* * *

You returned like a volunteer plant, unexpected and irrepressible.

We decided to let the yard grow wild and see what would emerge if we removed our grasp.

Tiny, lobed leaflets cropped up among the once tidy lawn.

Pumpkins.

We placed small, wire baskets upside down over them, an attempt to preserve the burgeoning life force.

When one grew large enough to transplant, we gathered around it in the grass, sitting cross-legged, examining the virgin leaves with hands that felt too giant and eyes filled with hope.

You wiggled the surprise pumpkin sprout from the clay… its single, sturdy life source materializing from the point of a wayward seed.

The dogs watched curiously over our shoulders.

You cupped my hand, your fingers resuscitated roots reaching for my heart