“Fecund” is the first word I voluntarily looked up in a dictionary; I’d read it in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I don’t recall much about the book, except fecund. The word itself. I was fourteen, and my world was constricted, barren. I was hesitant to trust that fecundity was even a thing.
And so for the last quarter century, I’ve been haplessly dithering at making a garden, trying, at the very least, to make room for beauty and life.
We planted apple trees after I learned my second babe would be a boy, and I panicked at prospect of having to feed two human male teenagers. How could we possibly afford it! I decided to landscape with food.
I ordered bare root trees and together we planted them one dark January evening, that tiny baby in the front pack under my coat, before his name felt like his so we referred to him by various terms, usually The Stink. (“Just enough edge with that to give him something to talk about in therapy later,” my therapist friend said, “but not actually damaging or cruel.”)
Twenty years later, and just before the Mortal Peril, I had been ready to take out the apples. The boys were grown and the trees had served their purpose. The upkeep was hard.
But then I didn’t get around to it, what with the Mortal Peril and all. And because I was going to remove them, I didn’t have my pal Steve the Tree Killer come over to prune.
Evidently the trees did not get the memo that they were no longer required, and they’re producing like gangbusters. Two years of unchecked growth. Looks like I will be able to process enough applesauce and apple butter this fall to survive the apocalypse.
And in the back garden, the cover crop is growing to beat the band. Because of the side-sewer disruption, I didn’t get the vegetables in until late, but, this week, finally, I found a tomato.
The apples, the cover crop, the tomato. All good signs, but hard, hard work. I’ve been out every morning for an hour or so the last week, and everything hurts—lower back, hips, shoulders. (At the Red Hot the other day, I had to ask my pal to finish his beer and dog so we could head out. “This wooden chair is killing me.”) I have been under the evidently false impression that infirmity and decrepitude wouldn’t impact the gardening for another ten years or so. But mostly it’s a good soreness, reminding me I’m still alive, dammit.
Sometimes I wish I had known how to ask for help in the garden after the Mortal Peril. Although, it was already beginning to get out of control when I ended up in the hospital.
Usually I only find dismembered toy dolls in the gardens. Or auto parts. But today I found a volunteer oak tree, thigh high. That’s right. OAK. TREE.
So. If I had asked for help, that forgotten stash left by some industrious squirrel might not have taken root.
And on Friday both my boys will be home with their particular friends for feasting and end-of-summer reveling.
Fecundity for the win.