Exercise In Fruitility
“October crop of
raspberries is ripe,” I called from the back garden. I heard a groan from
Bob, then the squeal from a broken spring on the living room
couch as he slowly plied himself up.
“Be careful what you wish
for, you might just get it,” I trilled, as we lumbered with
our buckets to the raspberry patch. The overabundance has
resulted in two wonderful things, which I’ll tell you about in
a minute.
What’s important to know
first is the following:
until the raspberries, nothing grew in Bob’s
garden. OK, I’m
being my pre-therapy black or white self. Rabbits grew. So did snakes and
moles. (If you
ever see a mole, you will ask yourself, “What was God thinking
when he made this?”)
Electric fences grew two
feet per year.
Once I had to distract Bob from looking out the window
at 2 AM, by lighting a match under our smoke alarm. I had just seen a
raccoon get zapped by the electric fence, shake his head, and
quickly scoot a couple feet to the no-apple tree, which he
scaled before flinging himself into the empty podded pea
area.
Heavenly scented piles of
cow manure grow bigger each year. “No horse manure?” I
once asked out of tremendous conversational boredom over
dinner.
“No! Hayseeds sprout.” Enthralled with
the subject, he stopped eating steamed squash, which our
neighbors, with gardens two feet away, pile in such
copiousness on our front walk, that it has the appearance of a
yellow cord of
wood.
“Chicken
manure?”
“Too
hot.”
“And that means . . .
?”
“Too fresh. Like new wine. It must be
aged.”
Bob does not find this
concept funny, which requires me (so as not to laugh) to bite
the inside of my cheek, where by summer’s end, tiny bleeding
blisters always
form.
Every year, he starts
hundreds of seedlings under a grow light. When they sprout, he’s
like a cooing new mother. Three weeks later,
when they’re all dead, he plants another batch. It’s like raising
lemmings.
And so this past spring, he
relented. “I have
something to tell you,” he solemnly said. “The garden . . . is
dead.”
I bit my cheek a
little.
“Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust,” he
intoned.
I could taste
blood.
He picked up a shovel and
began turning under chewed up stems of spinach that may have
once had leaves.
I had to help resolve
this. (Gardeners
should have their own Samaritan’s hotline.) After hours of
searching, I found the Park Seed catalog and finally declared,
“Bob, you need
raspberries.”
And this summer it
happened. Bob
produced. Buckets
of berries, freezers full of berries. Drawers and cupboards
brimming with canned berries. And listen to this -
the first wonderful thing. He won a red ribbon at
the Barnstable County Fair for his raspberry
jam.
So this Halloween, as we
always do, we’ll prowl the neighborhood pro-actively treating
with bags of goodies we leave on doorsteps. Which leads me to the
second wonderful thing.
(Don’t worry - they’ll still get Reese’s.) Each bag will have a
jar of Red Ribbon
Jam.
And so, I looked over at Bob, as we finished plucking this second harvest, and saw raspberry stain on the front of his old torn flannel shirt. We carried in four buckets of juicy berries, no longer mindful of the fruitlessness of past labor. And this we learned: if fulfillment remains illusive, try a different path of pursuit. And in the long run, as appreciation so often takes, we felt grateful that we got what we wished for.
