You’d think there would not be much for me to report, given that it’s been in the high 90’s every freaking day. For weeks now. You’d think that nature or creation or whatever you want to call the natural world around us would be burned up or at least give out for the time being, at least in my part of the world.
But that’s the thing about nature or creation or whatever you want to call it.
Once you get to a place where concrete and asphalt and Walmart and Starbuck’s aren’t taking up space, the rhythm that is part of natural life shines through even the hottest days. And the robustness, the downright resilience amidst constant change of it all is humbling.
We harvested muscadines this past week. Their skins tight and tough and purple and dense, the musk and twang that is particular to a muscadine’s flavor and aroma filled the air around the vines and my heart. Considered an acquired taste, my acquisition was made decades ago in Arkansas while collecting them from the dappled, musky woodland floor as Dad shook the trees in which the vines grew. When I first moved to Houston I didn’t know how to distinguish the vines from it’s much inferior tasting cousin the Mustang grape, but I do now. Smashed and squashed muscadines, their super food goodness growing wild and naturally organic all over any green space in Houston, remained a mostly un-gathered bounty along bike trails and city walkways this year. But not at the farm.
And then there is the okra. As far as I am concerned, okra is a miraculous kind of plant that only the God I know could have come up with. They just keep on keeping on no matter how dad blasted hot it is anywhere in the world they are grown. Out of Africa, spreading through Egypt, the French eventually bringing it to Louisiana back before that state was a state, every single day, each stalk has at least one new hibiscus flower that blooms above the sandy, hot soil. Each day tens of native pollinators, especially bumble bees, stick their proboscis deep into the yellow flower and within 36 hours you have a delicious pod, ripe for picking, full of minerals, vitamins and fiber. And when I say full of, I mean full of. There is nothing better than a mess of fried okra and not much that would be better for you. Unless it’s a pot of okra and tomatoes. Or pickled okra in a jar at Christmas. Silent Bob planted two rows of okra early in the spring and saved them from seasonal extinction from some okra-leaf-eating varmint by a hearty application of seven dust. These two rows will allow for all of the above options until frost kills their six foot stalks.
For the first time since we’ve owned the farm the pear trees have kept their fruit, their limbs increasingly unattractive and gnarly as the dense fruit weighs them down. This year the fruit is rotting nicely on the tree. I have no clue why the gray squirrels or raccoons have not ravaged the trees, the fruit gone in less than a day before they are even remotely ripe, as they have in the past. Something in this particular cycle of life changed. If I was a better observer, I might ferret out the answer. For now, I have watched as the pears, little and hard and unsweet, with weeks of heat, now perfume the walkway with their overripe, fetid smell. As yeast and fungus darken the skins, I find I don’t mind it. My bees love the bounty.
Even my agaves have performed. Agaves are relatives of asparagus. But different. Their fleshy, giant rosette leaves tipped with spines that could act as sewing needles if you were an ancient, spend most of their plant life storing up water and carbs. I’m talking years. After ten or so, they expend every bit of those stores to make a flowering, towering stalk. The oldest agaves at the farm, a green one and a blue-green one that I planted between the house and the barn, sent their masted flower stalks thirty feet in the air. For the last 2 months, literally thousands of pollinators in the form of bees and wasps and hummingbirds have decorated those stalks. Like a summer Christmas tree, the pollinators as living ornaments sucked every bit of nectar from every bloom. As they feasted, the once fleshy agave leaves wrinkled and withered. I enjoy this when I see it. The agaves are dying but little “pups” offshoots form around them and will take their place. There is a sense of rightness about the way the agave lives and dies. There is beauty in those leaves, the wrinkles evidence of purposeful, well spent life.
I hope maybe I am the same.
This week my mother asked me if I was afraid of dying. It’s not like there isn’t a single one of us who doesn’t think about that question. She’s asked me before and I always want to give her an honest answer. “Ask…”, she says, when I have told her my answer and she immediately requests that I ask that same question to someone she knows is a mentor to me in things of God and death and faith.
“He says he used to be, but isn’t anymore…” I tell here and I let her read what he wrote. Among a number of very thoughtful things he said there is something that resonates with me in this time and this place. “As I have gotten older,” he says, “I realize that things end.”
You see, this is life. This bounty and decay. This fresh and new and then wrinkled. What matters is not that things ends, we can chafe against that but its such a bold and unalterable truth, we should get past at balking at it. Life as we know it here has an end. What matters is how we navigate the moments and days that we have. It pays to stop and refocus. For me, a Christian, what is more important is that I do this in the power of an incredible being who designed me, placed me, knows me, and loves me. And promises me that one day, I will understand full how miraculous He is, in part His whole idea in coming up with okra. And my sons. And the wonderful plans He’s had for them even before they were mine. Because you see lately, it’s them and the legacy I see in them that makes each day and the prayers I say and the cycle of life something that brings me such joy I hardly know how to contain it.
Even when they are responsible for at least a fair number of my wrinkles.
