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| Flowers, chard, Brussels sprouts, weeds... and hidden cabbages |
“I found a cabbage in the garden,” says Sam.
To understand all the implications of this statement, one
has to understand our garden: knee-deep in some invasive, creeping thing that we’ve
pulled out again and again, only to discover that it takes root wherever we
throw it. Clogged with fallen tomato cages, smothered in pumpkin vines. Cabbage
was one of the things we’d given up on. We planted ten cabbage seedlings last
spring, only to lose them to slugs, ants, and digging cats. Then planted
ten more from seed, only to discover that they were actually Brussels sprouts.
Now Sam acts as if he’d just been
handed a marvelous surprise, while I stand at the sink trying to wash enough
pots to cook dinner in. It would appear that he’s perfectly all right with the
chaos our garden has become.
I’m not.
There’s a reason why I don’t write much about this so-called
farm of mine. This person trying to hold down a
full-time academic job, push through the sixth revision of a novel, support a
teenage daughter in one crisis after another, stay married, and have a
farm too? She is utterly insane to think she can do even half of this. Certainly,
there’s no need for her to share that insanity with others.
But Sam is happy about this one cabbage. And it does make an amazing coleslaw, with that flavor you just can't buy in the produce section of the grocery store.
Our garden may look like a weed pit, but it's also yielding like
crazy. A big barrel of potatoes, stored in the basement. A full year’s supply
of garlic and onions. Kale, chard, Brussels sprouts, and leeks that we’ll be
eating well into fall. Enough tomatoes to fall from the vines and rot in the
paths. And, now we’re clearing away some of the summer plants, cabbages.
It seems a few of them survived after all. There were just so many other things
in the way that no one knew.
The book and the garden have a lot in common. A friend said to me,
when she got the massive tome of the fifth draft in the mail, “I can’t believe
you wrote all this!” What’s really unbelievable, I wanted to tell her, is all the pages I deleted before they got as far as you.
Now, one draft further on, the sprawling pumpkin vines of the imagination will have to go. Taking this manuscript down from 133,000 words to 100,000 promises to involve
pruning out some 50,000 words, then wedging 20,000 very different ones back in
just the right places. Remembering, at every turn, the shape and structure of
the whole. Weeding. Something I’ve never been very good at.
