A tomato slow down

And a pepper pick-me-up.

Almost on cue, the garden is packing it in for the summer. The tomato vines are drying up. Some fruit ripens on brown vines. Other fruit dehydrates where it hangs. 

With some help and a helper’s chipper, any soil exposed by the dying crops is now mulched by the gift of a fallen limb.

It may be a bit early, but I couldn’t help myself. I have the first of the fall crop transplants sown in plugs in the laundry room. 

The outdoor oven (aka the weather) has begun. Perhaps I’ll set aside some corn stalks for Halloween. They’re drying where they stand quite nicely.

I made time.

Words are funny things, wiley creatures, slippery and shimmery. One makes time. Surely not. And yet…

Commonly on business trips, I do not make time. My usual work doesn’t stop its demands when the work on site adds its needs to the clamor of the day. And so I retire to my hotel in the evenings with my takeout and my laptop until past my bedtime. 

Not this time.






My children, I realized, do not know that a darkened forest tunnel will feel cooler, the air lighter, than the meadow they just exited. They haven’t learned the precise angle that is safe to traverse down a rooted path to a creek bed without tumbling. They don’t know that the quiet one walks, the more one sees. 

I have my work cut out for me making more time for the important lessons of childhood.