Before 19, Volume 3, 2014
Harvest
Harvest By Gillian Goodman I run to the garden most days in early autumn. Burst from the car, drop the backpack, circle past the front door and around to the wooden fence with sticky hinges. The momentum that shoots me from the car stills as soon as I round the corner, dies like a stale wind, gently removes its firm hands from my back and drifts someplace else. If it’s easy, I’ll slip out of my shoes, but I usually don’t have the patience for laces. So I’m either barefoot or in heavy black boots when I reach the 8 x 8 foot patch of tilled earth, with cut wood boards keeping the dirt from spilling out of its careful square. I take a breath. Sometimes two, if it was one of those days when the straps from my backpack leave imprints in my shoulders and I can feel my heartbeat pulse behind my eyes. In the garden stand four tomato plants, their overburdened weight held up by long thin sticks and their vines tangled up in each other. They reach all the way up to my head, and almost every day we have to find some new way to support their majesty. There’s one small eggplant sprout, which crouches dejectedly in the last of the four corners. It sometimes bears one or two misshapen purple teardrops, which we pick but never eat. If it’s hot, as it often is these days, the space will smell like warm clay, and some unmistakable growing scent lies sharp in the air, feeling like yellow shoots sprouting up in your nose. If it’s rained the day before, or even raining when I arrive, a heavy softness is everywhere, and the space smells of damp earth and Italian grandmothers, and the world is green and dripping. Orange and yellow and purple tomatoes lie still and glistening, lying in shades of green and gold. When the sunlight comes from behind, I can see their soft pink veins showing through, looking like stained glass windows in an outdoor cathedral, and I marvel at their architecture. Sometimes I lie down in the wet grass beside the boards and wait until I can feel the earth rotating underneath me, circling the sun. The tomatoes are as nice to eat as they are to smell, and on Sundays I go to them in a blue dress with yellow sunflowers and big pockets. I pinch them gently from their beds and shove gleeful handfuls into the deepest parts of the dress. I let them roll softly in my palms, and the dew that lingers from the early morning anoints my fingertips like holy water. I press my hands to my face and
inhale. Some have splits in their deep red sides from too many days on the vine, and these are the sweetest. Sometimes I take the dog with me, and something about the place makes him come when I call. He trots along beside me while I pace up and down the perimeter, slipping him halves of overripe tomatoes. Maybe something about the green smell of the place recalls in him the spirit of the complacent country dog, or else some other magic turns him from his stubborn self into the picture of pastoral companionship. Sometimes, if we’re out there for a while, he’ll sit panting in the shade, curled in on himself and sniffing the grass. On other days he lies with me, his soft flank pressed to my legs or back, and we stare up at the trees and smile. I love it there, and I love myself there, and I love the whole of the world and everything in it when I’m there. Every atom seems perfectly placed, and I find proof of god again and again in the patterns of the leaves and the curve of the sky. I fill up big bowls of orange and yellow and purple and bring them inside to display proudly in a windowsill. I even love watering the plants, the green plastic can, the stretch and pull in my arms from carrying the weight of the water, the inevitable sloshing. It’s like a small pilgrimage: from the sink to the garden from the garden to the sink, I make my rounds like some dutiful devoted. It gives me something to think about besides myself, and the pilgrimage begins anew every fall, like clockwork. It’s a garden without temptation or trouble. It’s a garden without snakes. It’s a small garden, but I run to it regardless.