Morning all. Feeling good in the Mid week. Let’s see how that affects the writing prompt. Timers set for fifteen minutes and lets see how this sentence unfolds.
Well i did put off my gardening chores this year…
Wednesday, December 13th: Temperatures dropped in the night.
Temperatures dropped in the night. By dawn’s light I could see that the garden went from lush and green to brown and desiccated. The leaves on the fig tree, once glossy and spread out like dinner plates, drooped low and looked like brown rags hanging from the tree limbs. They had not dried out as fall leaves often did, but looked like damp washing hung out to dry.
The grass was withered brown in spots and all around were the decimated bits of growth that were once my garden. This year summer extended well past the deadline and I hadn’t the heart to pull up plants that were still fruiting and producing. The day before I took in several small muckets of tomatoes and several large bowls of different sorts of peppers. Today I planned to turn the tomatoes into sauce and to string up the peppers to dry in my pantry.
Because I was still taking in the produce, I had not started my fall garden chores. Somehow fall never seemed to arrive. I shook my head and sipped my coffee as I looked over the frost wrought destruction. Today I would have no choice. What I picked the day before was all that I would get from this season. Anything left on vine or limb turned black with cold and would be unsalvageable.
While I planned to start with my produce in the morning, I knew that the garden itself needed to be my first priority. I finished my cup of coffee and dressed warmly. I stepped outside and pulled on my gardening gloves. The air was frosty and my feet crunched over the grass. In the places where the sun had risen enough to warm the earth a bit, the grass was simply wet instead of encased in a hard frosty shell.
I began my task of clearing the garden. I pulled decimated plants from the ground and shook out the cold earth. The frost was severe enough to kill the tender greens but it wasn’t hard enough to freeze the dirt into a solid lump. I suspected that time wasn’t too far away however and that this might be my last chance to pull up the spent plants without having to fight frozen ground.
I warmed as I worked but the air around me didn’t. The direct sunlight was enough to warm the grass where it touched but where shadows remained so did the frost. ‘I guess we skipped fall,’ I thought. Here this sort of frost was the first sign that fall was gone and winter was now creeping in. As the day before I wore short sleeves and shorts while running around to pick the last of the garden produce, today I was shivering in jeans and a sweatshirt, only my own movements keeping me warm.
‘An entire season missed.’
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. It felt like something randomly took chunks out of my entire year this year. I know things got done. I hadn’t missed any deadlines, but things kept happening and in between my regularly scheduled life there were moments of emergency where I just did what needed to be done. Looking back, I couldn’t tell anyone what they were. I couldn’t recount my actions. I only know that everything was taken care of. It was like those days were missing in my mind. That nature chose this year to swallow a whole season somehow didn’t come as a surprise.
Ten til Midnight 