things fall apart

Back in the US, it's the time of the year when plants just look exasperated, the grass crunchy and burnt.  Exhaustion has long since set in for gardener and garden alike. Down at my parents' house, I found weeds that rose taller than the coneflowers.  I reached into a thicket where the herbs used to be and received only a hand full of thorns; the basil, gone to seed, sported long thin spires of white flowers.  Their neighborhood is still: no voices, no children, only cicadas and crickets.  Afternoons belong to the bees and the ants alone.  In a few more weeks, the spiders will grow active.

There is very little in bloom, by now, for those bees - I searched for flowers to cut and found only one little pink zinnia braving the heat.  Even the redoubtable bee-balm looks tattered and tired and faded to an indeterminate color.  The potted geraniums by the front steps have not been rotated for months, so that they reach, spindly and awkward-looking, out to the sun.  Almost all the other annuals I had planted in early May, before I left for Berlin, were smothered by weeds or eaten by deer.  The roses look positively Burtonesque, enormous and gangly; I can read the history of past flushes by counting the bulbous, swollen hips, but those few blooms that remain are so soggy from the rain and heat that one touch from my finger knocks them apart and sends all the petals slumping to the ground.

By now, by mid-August, I find that my best intentions have got away from me.  I began in winter, with catalogues and books and dreams; and I emerged with my shovel and my plans (and a blog), in the spring; but then I left for Berlin, and now it is somehow late summer, and I missed life as it happened here while I was gone - the drought and deer and sullen dampness that left plants withered or eaten or moldy.  Even if this had been my own garden, and it is not, a garden full of weeds could make anyone want to give up, to start somehow anew.  You'd anticipate the cold frosts of early October that would give you permission to dream again - to dream without responsibility.

While talking to an English relative last week, we bonded over our shared fondness for weeding. She confessed that her career as a social worker had sometimes left her wishing that it was as easy to clean up people's lives as it is to tidy a garden bed.  Tending a garden is so straightforward: there are tasks to be done, and progress that you can measure in the clump of weeds and clippings at your feet.  But even in the garden, you can only do as much as you wish to do, and maybe not even that.  This garden will never, now, look as good as I planned that it would, and so the question is whether I want to let it look as bad as it does.

I thought of what she said, late yesterday afternoon, as the humidity swelled to 90% and the dog slumped reproachfully next to the front door and my knee itched from three separate mosquito bites.  The summer is not quite over, and besides, it is all that I've got.  There is work to be done in between now and frost.  You have got to just salvage what you can from this summer, I thought, clean up what you can, and let the frost take care of the rest.