When we lost Aurora, I stopped watering the garden and for sixteen days my vegetable garden burned in the sun.  I thought about it a time or two, but then I turned away.  I didn’t want to nurture a bunch of plants; I wanted to nurture my baby.

On the seventeenth day, I visited my garden.

Our sweet corn had ripened a week or two earlier, but we were so busy surviving that we overlooked it.  The stalks were yellow and withered.  The kernels were hard and dry.  A second variety of corn we were growing had been stressed by the sudden drought, had stopped growing and tassled early.

The sweet pepper plants had been overrun by weeds.  We’d lost nearly 2/3 of our tomato plants to heat, weeds, and gophers.  Every last one of our bean plants had been taken down by gophers.  Our squash plants were devastated, our cucumbers were going to seed, and our zucchini each weighed more than Charlotte.

Our pea plants had withered and died.  My native onions had been crushed, presumably by some critter who had made its nest on top of them.  The sweet potato plant had been taken by gophers.  The asparagus peas had mysteriously vanished.  Our gourds and pumpkins were taken by gophers.

None of my herb seeds germinated.  My licorice basil plant dried out and bent over, half-dead, and its leaves yellowed and its blooms darkened.  Our carrot greens fell over.

The only thing I had any time for at all was the apple tree.

This week is about mending the garden.  Planting new herb seeds.  Reviving that poor, unfortunate basil plant.  Laying out our winter vegetable garden plot.  Tying our corn stalks together to dry.  Harvesting the sorghum.  Removing dying zucchini and squash plants to the compost pile.  Watering the carrots.  Showing Charlotte how to pick an oversized watermelon.

I have been gardening long enough now to have seen that when my garden thrives, I feel more positive about my life.  As it is, I’m one of those irritating optimists who thinks her dogs fart sunshine, so it’s not like I’m ordinarily in dire need of more positivity…but I also believe in trusting my instincts and right now my instincts are telling me that this will help.  That turning this garden around, that watching new things grow again, that nurturing the plants that will provide sustenance to my family will help.

So outside we go, Charlotte and me, my grey gumboots beside her blue ones, my red trowel beside her pink one, both of us with our hands in the earth, to make this garden grow.