Pumpkins, and Time

Handsome Son helping out the Pumpkin Princess of Elkhorn

 Autumn has been flying past.  The garden is de-vesting itself of the pretty flowers and soft greens and colored leaves at an astounding rate.  My mother at her machine gun conversational rate, without pausing for air (or response) asked if I had my garden all ready for Winter.

?

I paused the train of my thoughts...Winter?

I feel like I have totally missed Autumn.
I have been so time-crunched.  I have been living in the moment and the next thing I HAD to do since September.  Other than sweeping the front porch and walk of pine needles, so it would not appear mine IS the haunted house on the block, I have not spent a lot of time in the garden.  The garden has been on the B-list this fall.

Many times I come back to the thought that I was not in my house last year at this time, instead I was lying in a bed staring at a ceiling in a black floral wallpapered room.  I was hoping time would pass.  I missed all the subtle nuances of the clear bright blue of the sky (one of my paternal grandmother's favorite things), the beautiful shading of the maples as they turned (one of my grandfather's favorites surely, as he planted a grove of maples ringing his front lawn, handpicking each one from those in a swamp bordering my father's farm).

I often consider where I gathered my appreciation for gardening.  Surely not from my mother's side of the family.  My maternal grandmother's garden had flowers and vegetables lined up in regimental rows.  She was a stern gardener.  Everything served a purpose and if it did not deliver it was out.  The most kindness I ever saw in her though was the planting of pansies each Good Friday in a pot by the steps.  Her yard also had nearly the largest collection of flowering shrubs, even the trees flowered as there were catalpas ringing her yard

Certainly her yard had the old-fashioned lilac, but it had a white lilacs and several cultivars typically not seen in the yards of other farmers: a double-flowering almond (the largest one I have ever seen), bridal wreath, several different flowering crab apples, flowering hawthorns, and others which my childhood memories fused with my adult knowledge still am unable to identify.  The yard was not one of plants passed along or dug from the wild.

So among my ponderings and just taking in the beauty of Autumn as I go from point A to point B this fall, has been my thoughts on where this need to garden has come from and have I passed it along to my son.  Will he come back to it?  Is it latent in his interest in hydrology as he studies chemistry?  Is the idea of water falling on the land something fundamental I have inscribed on his DNA?

The writing on the wall, old school...meant to be inspirational during my son's high school years.  I have been living with this black room.  Redecorating it is also on my B list.

A graphic from a Gel-writer pen transposed to my son's bedroom wall.

So as the completion of my too long A-list comes to a finale (in about ten days), I will dig those carrots, and plant that last potted shrub, and maybe mulch the leaves in my yard.  Or not.  I always remind myself how nice my yard was this year and how I was here to do none of that last year, but I have made time just to soak it all in.  That is always on my A-list.