Fruition (literally)

It’s that time of the year, when the garden has grown wild and unruly and I’ve pretty much given up. I allow myself to wander without purpose and marvel at the petty miracles that present themselves to me like mid-summer gifts: the astonishing ability of melons to tendril onto any support they can find; the wild pandemic hairdo of potato vines that obscures the hidden tubers nestled deep in the ground; the surprise discovery of what appears to be—dare I hope it after the brutal demolition by the Rabbit Brigade?—a single sunflower plant with one, two, three, four, five buds about to blossom.

There is endless, irrefutable evidence of fruition. Things coming to be at long last.

As I walk in the garden, I find myself scratching my head and thinking, “Now, what can I make out of that?” Well, to begin with, there’s lots of salsa and gazpacho to be wrought from those obscenely huge heirloom tomatoes. And at least one dish of eggplant parmesan from the cluster of baby eggplants that appeared like a miracle when I had given up hope (never having grown eggplant before, so not understanding their shy nature). And there are a lot of good jokes to be made from the spiny cucumbers that hang like heavy elephant trunks from the trellises.

But apparently, I can also make a blog post out of the garden (which is not something they mention in the gardening books), because fruition happens. But not only in the garden.

As I think about fruition in my life…

I had three books come out this year. That’s never happened to me before. There will be two more next year, there is one more that’s been accepted for publication, one more that I’ve nearly finished writing, and three more ideas that I’m turning over and tilling in my mind. In mid-summer, my brain seems always to be working on the telling of something—a story, a poem, a joke, a blog post. I allow the word redolent to roll around in my mouth. I feast on plot and character and setting. I store away story ideas for the cold winter months ahead.

Fruition.

I’m building a small house in the woods in Maine. I’ve been going up there as often as possible to watch the impossible happen: space opened up, a foundation properly laid, the magic trick of a well that brings water up from the ground. I stood for hours watching the well digger work his machine. At seventy-six, he’s probably dug more than ten thousand wells, but this was my one and only, and I didn’t want to miss a single minute. When he struck water, after pounding through one hundred feet of solid ledge, a small piece of the ancient rock shot out, and he gave it to me, saying, “This is the rock that sits at your water table.” I’ve placed that rock on my writing desk, the proof of what can come up when you work hard enough at something and stick to it through the hours of not knowing. In the next few months, walls will rise, a roof will be pitched, doors will hang on their hinges. I’m already planning a small, slatted bench that will sit outside so that I can take off my muddy boots when I come in from the garden. What a thing to come to be.

Fruition.

In September, when the last of the tomatoes will be ripening and I’ll already have planted the fall-to-winter leafy greens—kale and spinach and swiss chard—that will carry me through to the wetness of next spring, my youngest child will move to France. We curl up on my bed, as we’ve done since she was an infant, and scout out apartments on the internet and imagine the route she’ll walk to work and practice our French (hers is quite good and mine is a funny-sad joke). I look at her, my youngest, and think, What a thing to come into being. Because all of us are was and is and will be, all at the same moment, but it’s a particular moment when a young person first launches into the world, a specific and peculiar confluence of all that ever was and everything that absolutely is and the whole of what might be. And as her mother, I hold all three of those beings in my mind as perhaps only I can, having been there from before the beginning and always thinking about her future, even before she was born.

We are rounding the corner into August, and summer will soon turn its back on us. But what a season of fruition it has been. My heart and mind and stomach are full of it. Until the last fruit drops from the rotting vine, I will continue to walk in the garden and think to myself, “Now, what can I make of that?”