This is the lay of the land right now, from the deck of our house. It's the first week of August, in the year of our Lord, 2020. The corn is tall and tassled in bronze, lower leaves just starting to yellow. The prairie out back has more than its share of Russian thistles, but I've been fighting, believe me, and the testimony that it could be worse is the huge pile of weediness way out back. Here and there hit squads of ragweed are getting taller every day, but they're annuals and they pull easily. You just got to do it.
The patch of prairie we tend isn't as showy as it was last year, but right now I think we're just about peak color, even though the big shot sunflowers have only begun to show off their wares. For reasons known only to agronomists, out back it's been the Year of the Bee Balm. There's much more of it, and it seems when it flowers it stays around longer. What's more, yesterday I saw plants just now beginning to flower. Seems like they've been with us all summer.
If that big thing on the left is mare's tail, then I've been shamed. But the prairie out back is so thick that I've long ago stopped wandering in to jerk out the offenders. It's a wonder really to imagine what it was like out here in the original prairie before that first plow turned back the topsoil.
The dancers are everywhere. We get any wind at all, and the performance begins, as you can imagine. I don't know that I'd call it ballet exactly. It's likely closer to hip-hop, a wild, rambunctious performance all around. I'm amazed that such fragility takes what it does from the wind. Good breeding, I suppose, this clump of brothers might say, generations of I-shall-not-be-moved ancestry. Or else, "we were created that way." I'm not sure if this bunch tout creation or Darwin. Seems to me they don't have to be wrangling.
The garden is just beginning to put food on the table.
Upstairs in the kitchen about a dozen little ones are ripening. My wife says I pick them just a shade on the youthful, but they'll get red inside. Besides, I can't help myself. We wait and wait and worry and worry, and when they start coming in, I, for one, grab 'em. Today, I'll be wiser, more adult, more capable of restraint.
For the cantalope, we wait. There's nothing we can do. It would take a herculean effort to pull this guy from his lifeline. But one of these days--maybe even today, that belly button will distinguish itself and we'll see what's golden sweetness is inside.
Right now they're like Adam and Eve, so much luxuriant garden around that, even though they're shotput-like, they hide within their emerald attire. So I keep waiting for the first bit of discoloration. Six healthy muskmelons, our firstfruits, will soon be ready, the rest not as many nor as big from the plants a week or two younger.
Truth be told, there's far less gain for all our work than you might think. I've had tomatoes on my sandwiches for the last three meals. Any day now, we'll have muskmelon to give away, and no end to butterflies. But I've spent hours and hours and hours out back, especially this year, hiding from a virus.
How we doin' mid-pandemic? Right now, pretty blessed well, all around. Wouldn't you say?
Besides, there's always the dawn.
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