The Garden

A gardener accepts reality

The shade of too many trees came at the garden from all sides. Why had I remembered that section as sunny? It was so far from the spigot, watering was arduous and deeply resented in the summer heat. And it lured rabbits. Who knew we had rabbits?

I was garden-weary, so garden-weary. What was it exactly that had driven me to carve out a garden in the farthest reaches of the back yard? Oh, right. A special dinner at summer’s end, before the kids went back to college.

And it was special. That beautiful dinner—the beans, the marinated cucumbers, piles of tomatoes, roasted eggplant—all of it . . . came from Whole Foods, except for one woody zucchini on the grill,

I lifted my glass to the approaching autumn and the leaves that would soon cover over both the garden and the guilt of a non-gardener who’d thought she could remake herself.