I pick a few cucumbers to go with lunch and a zucchini to make a dessert bread later in the day and a small bunch of zinnias for color.

Some days, like yesterday, I think I will give up the garden and visit the farmer’s market more often. I think I will leave all of the work behind and, instead, buy from those who do it so well, the backyard gardener, the one I see from the road while driving by, the one with the old straw hat and long-sleeved shirt orchestrating an aesthetic masterpiece.

He spends his day there, battling bugs, tying tomatoes, turning over peas for nitrogen, encouraging bees and ladybugs, and staying close to the earth. I want to be that person; I am, in my soul, but I do get discouraged.

Anyway, I think of quitting when I am finding ways to scale down and simplify – the catch phrase of the decade – I think about having more time to stop and rest, but then I go outside in the very early morning and the peppers have plumped up from the rain, the sun begins to shine but is still timid and kind, the dragonflies and monarchs hoover and light on the tiny white blooms of my pepper plants and, suddenly, my garden is so beautiful and giving.

I pick a few cucumbers to go with lunch and a zucchini to make a dessert bread later in the day and a small bunch of zinnias for color. There are herbs for sauces and squashes and peppers and melon vines with promise and all of my practical sense has banished, once again. “We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.”

I wrote this journal entry ten years ago in June of 2012. It is still true today.

very year, somewhere in late June, I am a very disheartened gardener. This year the bugs and extreme temperatures have been my nemesis. However, as in each summer of my life, I have learned something in my garden, something to perhaps, make the next year better.

Mother Nature is a steadfast teacher; she always has a lesson. Her knowledge is infinite and the garden is one of her most artistic schoolrooms.

In spite of the weather and the bugs, my kitchen counter is somewhat colorful with small tomatoes and medium sized cucumbers and my tiny vases near my sink are readily stocked with zinnias, just as my summer kitchen has always been. It does, however, seem more difficult this summer; it seems Mother Nature is in some sort of fury and her extreme heat is the manifestation.

I suppose there will be some sort of adjustment. I know there is an attempt at compensation for my fig trees are “loaded” as are my citrus trees; life gives and it takes, it wanes and waxes just like the moon.

I do not know any of what the future holds, for it seems life is more uncertain now than before; the world is a big amplified cosmos of unsettlement and I am fearful at times.

I do know that, if I am able, next spring, I will plant my garden and in late June, I will grumble about the heat and the bugs and think about it being my last, but then, I will see someone in a garden, a garden with rows of promise and goodness wearing an old straw hat and a long-sleeved shirt and I will fall in love once more.