In the quiet hours of a mid-October morning, I notice my children momentarily distracted by play. I slide my bare feet into the red galoshes sitting by the door and sneak outside before anyone remembers they need me. Steam quickly rises from my coffee cup in the cool morning air, and I wish I had grabbed a sweater. It feels too risky to go back. I let the rising sun and a big slug of coffee warm me instead as I make my way towards the garden.
The bees beat me to it, I see. Fluffy and busy, they bounce between the opened pumpkin blossoms sprawled across the lawn and climbing cosmos, simultaneously wild and delicate, crowding the walking path. I sense the bee’s hunger, to seek, to gather, to fill up on the sweet nectar of the season before hibernation calls them home. They know. It’s time.
The first frost is in the forecast. I know I must gather and fill up, too, if I want to make full use of the garden’s harvest before it’s too late.
Following their lead, I hunt for tomatoes ready to release from the vine. There are more than my hands can contain, so I use my shirt as a sling, nestling them in one at a time, careful not to squish their juicy insides. It astounds me that I had a hand in growing these monster plants from small seeds, baby shoots, a couple of leaves transplanted into soil. Those days of watching and waiting for signs of slow growth feel like years ago, not months. I don’t think I will ever grow tired of the miracles contained in vegetable gardens.
The sound of little footsteps behind me pulls me from my meditation. I’ve been discovered.
“Mama, I help,” I hear Leo’s tiny voice call. “I get pomatos, too.” He charges over, dewey grass sticking to his bare feet, and reaches his hand into the overgrown bushes.
“Here’s one pomato!” he shouts, grasping in his chubby fingers a very green tomato and shoving it in my face. I look down at him, his face beaming with pride, eyes peeking through tufts of pale ginger hair. His hair is quite overgrown, too. The garden isn’t the only thing that has been growing this season.
“Remember, look for the red ones. The green ones aren’t ready yet.” I take his gift and add it to my pile. I’m familiar with this routine by now. A cue of green tomatoes just like this one already line my window, ripening in the sun.
I pull back the leaves to show him a bunch of red ones at his eye level. “I gah yet!” he shouts, clutching the fruit in his hand like a prize and yanking it free. I reach out my hand to take it from him but he clutches it to his chest.
“Put it in my tummy, mommy.” I stare with confusion. “In my tummy, right here!” His request gets more urgent until I notice he points to his shirt. He wants to hold the tomato as I do.
Well, that is adorable, I swoon. I instantly forgive him for interrupting my quiet time and for picking the green tomatoes, and maybe for every other thing he will do in the next 16 years. I’m certain he knows this, too, as he looks up at me and flashes his dimpled grin.
There are some moments in life when a series of differing thoughts crush into one another at the same time. Here I look down at my shirt and see the harvest knowing we are soon approaching the last of the season. At the same time, I see my shirt pulling away from my body, cradling the delicate fruits, and I think of the babies that grew under this shirt. I think of the way I once looked down to see the evidence of expanding life inside. And then I see that life at my feet, the last baby I held, and I remember he is growing too. I’m not really sure how all of these thoughts can happen at one time, but they do. They merge together like elements in a cocktail and get all shaken up until it’s hard to distinguish one from the other. It’s just all one muddled thought.
Is that thought sadness? A little bit. It’s change and loss, and that feels like sadness.
Some of it is gratitude for the gifts the garden brings, and the children.
But where I think I want to land is preservation.
Ever since this baby made himself known through a pregnancy test, I began the process of preservation, of harvesting all of the lasts when they were at their sweetest prime, securing them tightly in jars, storing them on shelves to dole out slowly on the quieter days. I would savor it all.
We all know how that goes. Between difficult pregnancies and even more difficult baby years, the process of remembering it all falls to the end of the to-do list. The children grow. Slow at first, especially the long days, when you stare at them like the seeds in the ground, wondering when they will ever be big enough to offer you fruit. But then they are. Literally offering you fruit from the tiny hands, the ones that grasped tightly to shirts and fingers. Today it is a tomato, but what next, I wonder. Keys to a car? A diploma? A partner’s hand?
See, this is what happens when the thoughts crash in on one another. This is what happens when you cling too tightly to preservation. It turns to hoarding and scarcity and end of days. This is no way to live, no way to love our little ones.
I once heard a friend confess her assumption that those who preserve food do it from a doomsday prepper perspective. So I can see the confusion. Certainly, if you read Education by Tara Westover or other stories on survivalists living off the grid, it is common for this culture of people to can and store food in preparation for the end of the world. But I have come to understand preservation as something else entirely.
In October, as the leaves turn, a gardener experiences a bout of melancholy. The seeds have grown, the fruit is finishing its harvest, and soon the beds will be put to sleep, blanketed in cold through a long winter. It’s both a celebration and mourning. This is when the gardener begins to think about how to take the life of summer and make it last a little longer.
She does this with preserves. She trims the herbs and tucks them into pools of oil and butter for freezing, ready to flavor the roasts on Sunday afternoons in November. She blanches and freezes the leafy greens dreaming of the soups they will dance in for quick dinners in January. She slow-cooks the tomatoes taking them from sweet to sweeter, so on Friday evenings at the end of a long week at the end of a long winter at the end of an even longer month of March, she can still taste the reminders of the summer days that surely are right around the corner.
These preserves are gifts to her future self. They are a time capsule, both a reminder of what was and what is to come. Both a chance to celebrate the bounty as well as gently notice what we miss.
So it is with gardeners, but can it also be with moms? I look at my littlest, looking up at me, and I wonder if I have done enough to preserve this life we share together, he and I, and his siblings too. Sure, I sometimes escape, get distracted, maybe wish away the time. But I also snap the pictures and pen the words, and I can’t help but pause and marvel at good moments like this one. I have to hope this is all good for something. I have to hope that, like the bees, I have stored up enough of the sweet nectar these good days offer to get us through the winters of an ever-changing life.
Taking the hand of my last baby, I squeeze his fingers in mine just a bit to make a memory of how it feels. Then we walk back to the house together. We’ll make a batch of tomato sauce later today. And maybe when we pull it from the freezer in a few months, it won’t just be the tomatoes I’ll remember about today.
