Summer Garden
The tomatoes come in anyway....
Poor Cousin Anatole has wandered into the long grass at the edge of the raised beds, stalking something he will not catch. He does not know the difference between hunting and killing time. Neither, some days, do I. By September he will have forgotten what he chased. This is not a failure of memory. It is a mercy built into cats, and denied, as far as I can tell, to the rest of us.
These are the days Dale told me he loved — when the temperature outside matches the temperature of the body exactly, no seam, no threshold, nothing to announce where the air stops and you begin. He told me this in October, in a cornfield in Southampton, both of us soaked through and freezing, the rain having arrived after everything else had already happened between us. It was not a seamless day. It was the opposite of a seamless day. I have wondered since whether that was the point — that he could stand in the coldest, wettest version of exposure and still describe, with total conviction, its inverse. I did not ask him. I was young enough to think a sentence like that was simply true, and not also a kind of forecast, or a kind of grief, filed early. He is gone from my life. I do not know if he is gone from the world, and I have stopped trying to find out.
I have stopped scrubbing the Birkenstock tan lines from my feet. The white stripe will not come off in the shower, and I have started to think of it as a record — proof that I stood somewhere, in sandals, in a heat with no seam in it, tending to something, decades after a boy told me what that felt like from the middle of a freezing field.
The zinnias do not apologize for their color.
I used to think tending was a kind of control. Now I know it is only attention, paid daily, without promise of return — the way you water a thing that will die in October regardless, the way October arrives on schedule whether or not you are ready for what it did to you once. Anatole will forget the shape of whatever he is chasing today by the time the frost comes. I will not. That is the whole difference between us, and it is not a small one, and no one is coming to explain why I was built this way and he was not.
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The Magpie Chronicles is written by M Sebastian Araujo from a handbuilt house deep in an old growth forest, where the winters are long and the opinions are longer.
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