The Pumpkins Are No Longer Mocking Me

There is rain in the forecast, an “above average chance for precipitation” in a week or so. Still, it is too early to unpack the car trunk, to bring in the quilts and photo albums, all the irreplaceables that live there from June until the end of fire season, which sometimes is not until December if the rains don’t come. Some of our biggest fires in recent years have broken out in November, the month when we used to think the worst of the fires was surely behind us.  The Camp Fire, the one that killed 85 people, started November 8, 2018.

So while I still have another few weeks of wrestling my portable massage table in and out of the backseat of my car (It normally lives in my car trunk but gets booted  during fire season), I am starting to breathe a little easier. The nights are cooling, and our lows will soon be dropping into the 40s again. The pumpkins which started appearing in stores in early September are not mocking me quite so much; I am no longer crabby when I pass a Starbucks and see an ad for one of their pumpkiny-gingerbready concoctions.

Because when it’s 90 degrees out, which it has been lately, you crave lemonade, iced tea, corn on the cob. As much as you want it to be autumn, as much as the calendar says it should be autumn, as much as you are longing for sweaters and snuggling under the heated throw blanket when you watch Netflix on Friday nights, as much as you are hungering for vegetable soup that warms the house and simmers in your crockpot all day, you can’t go there. Not when you are living through another toasty late September day and are sweating in the car with the air conditioning blasting  while waiting for your son to finish play practice.

But this last week, the high temperatures dropped some. And with rain in the forecast? Along with the good soaking rain that came earlier this week, one that made puddles and mud on my walk, so much that I had to pick up Biscuit and carry him around the wet sections, so that his paws wouldn’t get dirty? That gives me hope.

Before the rains come (and we pray they will come), I have  yardwork to do. I have a bag of bulbs to plant. My sweet friend gave me bulbs for my birthday, and I got so excited that I ordered another batch. Possibly a little too excited, since there are 100 of them sitting on the kitchen table. I also bought a pound of California poppy seeds, and need to scatter them around the property, especially in those areas where it seems like nothing will grow. California poppies are hardy and beautiful, the perfect flower for these parts. But a pound!  According to Mr. Google, that’s more than 295,000 seeds. Can you imagine the beauty if even a fraction of them sprout?

I  have a bit of “meadow mix” left from last year as well.  I scattered most of it last fall on a section at the bottom of our property. I had such high hopes that a beautiful meadow would flourish there. In the end, it didn’t do much. I probably didn’t clear the soil enough, and most likely there are years of weed seeds in that area, still waiting to sprout.

Except it wasn’t a total failure. Even though my dream meadow never materialized, there were a few wildflowers that were part of the seed mix that grew in random places and made themselves at home.

I tend to wait too long to plant my seeds, to dig in my bulbs. I am afraid of doing it wrong. As long as the seeds stay in the packets, the bulbs in their bags, there is infinite possibility.

Possibility. But never anything real. Seeds don’t sprout when they stay in their envelopes.  Bulbs don’t grow when they stay in their bags.

This is my endless struggle, friends. I want to do thing well, and am so afraid of failure that I habitually freeze and tell myself that I’ll do it tomorrow, or sometime soon, that I’m just waiting for the “right” time, which never comes. The path of growth for me? Doing something, even if it’s wrong or less than ideal. Because when I do nothing and cling to the hope that there will be a better time somewhere out there in the future? Failure is guaranteed. In the end, ironically, I end up with the very thing I dreaded: I have no meadow, no wildflowers, no daffodils in spring.  Yes, there is endless possibility, but nothing more. Possibility doesn’t grow a garden or make a life.

“You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take:”  wise words attributed to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. You also kill 100 percent of the seeds you don’t plant, and never enjoy any daffodils if the bulbs just stay in the bag.

I have a confession. Here is a perfect example of this:

It is the “Sweet 100” tomato plant that I bought last spring and meant to put in my whiskey barrel planter, which is behind a little fence on the back deck. It was going to be part of my little summer garden. Somehow, I never got around to planting it. In spite of everything, this brave plant produced two delicious, perfect tomatoes for me and is blossoming still, even though it had to live out its life in a tiny pot in a shady part of the front yard and got munched by the deer at least once. I waited and waited for the right time to plant, and that time never came.  Now it is too late. The time for a summer garden is gone.

It is not too late for the bulbs, though. Not to late to scatter my thousands of California poppy seeds. It is beautiful out, a good day for planting. Time to find my garden gloves, my shovel. Time to  do what I can.  It won’t be perfect. It won’t ever be perfect. But it is holy and wholly enough.