Promised Frost

This weekend Forrest and I started our fall garden cleanup. It takes a few Saturdays and I have to admit, it’s not my favorite. Not because of weather; the spring planting is tremendously less pleasant with misty rain and slugs everywhere. Not because of the work; these days, any chance to get outside and use some energy is welcome. It’s because it’s sad. All of the plants get ripped out and put on the compost, the perennials get trimmed back, and any final straggling harvest is brought in.

By now I am sick of gardening, ready for a winter full of resting and planning. I don’t really want to plant anything else. But I also don’t want to say goodbye to the hard work from the last season. There’s something about pulling out fully grown cucumber vines, which it took me five (five!) plantings to get started, that makes me think, “If only, if only the sun could continue, the weather could stay warm, we would have gotten so much more.”

I’m not sure if that’s botanically accurate. Do annual plants just give out after awhile? I’ve never lived in a place where the frost wasn’t looming in the future, offering a hard stop to the season. A hard stop to the hard work. A time to think over the last season and plan for the next. A promised respite, whether we like it or not.

A promised respite. I think that much of my life has been in pursuit of promised respite. I’m not a person who loves work. Forrest, he does his job because he likes it. I do my job because I want it to be done. I want to hold the finished product in my hand while I lounge on the sofa and eat my celebratory chocolate.

But in this season, both professionally and personally, there is no promised respite. I send this manuscript out to agents and hope that someone wants it. Eventually, at some undetermined point in time, I decide to put it back in a drawer and start on the next manuscript. I parent these children through the daily torture that is distance learning and hope that they are getting what they need. Eventually, at some undetermined point in time, the grownups in charge will decide they actually are grownups and the schools will be safe enough to use again.

How do we sustain motivation when there is no frost coming? There’s no hard stop to this work. Again, this is where I, the blogger, am supposed to give you 100 words that sum up everything and leave you feeling hopeful and resolved. But I’ve been gardening long enough to learn that there are things outside of human control. I fertilize the soil, plant the seeds, water them…and sometimes the cucumber plants don’t come up. The second time…they still don’t germinate. I wait, and plant again, and then the squirrels or rats or rabbits eat them. I plant a fourth time and one, just one precious plant comes up. I talk to that little plant - quoting The Last of the Mohicans, “You stay alive! You’re strong! You survive! Whatever it takes, you stay alive!” - and then it, too, gets eaten. Finally, in a last ditch effort of cheap supermarket seeds, I plant again, telling the kids, “There will probably be no cucumbers this year.”

And six weeks later, those same kids come rushing in with the first fresh cucumber of the season. There have been probably a hundred since then. So many that I was putting cucumbers out for every meal, including breakfast.

There are things outside of human control. I don’t control the cucumber seeds, I don’t control the frost, I don’t control the agents reading my work, I don’t control the pandemic, I don’t control the people in charge. But maybe what I do control is the promised respite. The moment where I say, “Enough.” Where I stop feeling bad for all the work there is to do and let myself celebrate all the work that has been done.

Because the other part of the fall garden cleanup is putting in the bulbs for next year. We plant tulips and lilies, garlic and peonies, thinking of how nice it will feel to see the green shoots coming up through the frosty ground come March. We not only give ourselves the respite, we give ourselves a little bit of a head start - seeding a little bit of motivation for the next big thing we’re going to do.

How can you promise yourself a respite today? When is your break coming? How can you let yourself celebrate what you have achieved and plan for the next?