As winter approaches, and the mountains in the distance turn white, I imagine how it might feel to be laying a garden of my own to rest soon.
gently covers the beds
rest well my garden
Three or four times a year, I pack my kids in the car, and we drive off to the countryside to visit a friend with a large vegetable garden. We all spend the day in the field harvesting this and that and return home with what looks like more vegetables than we could possibly eat.
A week later, the vegetables are always gone and a month later, I always feel like this.
the dirt in my car
still remains
Twenty years ago, I often spent time on the back porch of my girlfriend’s parents’ house, holding a glass of wine, looking over their extensive flower garden out into the fields where the deer gathered at dusk, hoping to find an empty home and a welcome snack.
watching silently waiting
for me to turn in
Beautiful and thought-provoking! I laid eyes on your first haiku and the third line jumped out at me "rest well my garden". It's deep and there are many ways to interpret this. I feel a nudge to write something on it. Hehe.
All the same, I love the way you capture the serenity of nature and simple things in life that we often overlook. Nicely done. !LUV 😊
Please do go ahead and write something about it. I’d love to read what you have to say.
I thought of a couple final lines for that poem, but I chose that one because it felt very affectionate to me, like it showed recognition of the special relationship between a gardener or farmer and the land and what it yields.
I agree it's an affectionate line to describe your relationship with your garden. 😊
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And a fabulous first entry it is!!! Three haibun!
I can tell you how it feels to put my garden to rest as winter approaches: finally, I can stop being a slave to this garden!
I love the second one, the traces of those carrots in your car. Every time you see the dirt, you get a tiny taste of carrot, a smidge of the pleasure you had in harvesting them with your children, and memories of the dishes you made with them. That one goes on and on until the dirt is cleaned. I see memory, the function of memory, time travel via earth.
Your poems always bring a scene alive for me. I see your GF parents' back field, the deer beyond their flower gardens, your glass of wine, and I feel a slight wind carrying your scent to the deer so that they know you are there.
Fine work, as always!!!
I like that, time travel via earth.
So when you stop being a slave to your garden, what takes over? Is there something else that you pour yourself into or chain yourself to, or do you just let yourself relax until spring?
It's sad watching your garden freeze up and die. I love having fresh produce right out of my garden. It's one of the reasons I moved to southern California, but it may be time to be moving out of here. It's just getting too expensive and crowded, plus my kid is grown!
I'm sure your kids love going out to country side. Where I grew up we always had deer, they lived within the city limits so they could never be hunted. Clever creatures. I remember one night one of our neighbors went out to scare the deer away from his garden, only to have a big buck chase him back into his house!
!DHEDGE
That’s funny, and is something I’d like to be able to say that I’ve seen. It must have been pretty terrifying for your neighbor. A charging buck is dangerous.
When I was a kid, a couple of bucks were fighting and chasing each other through the neighborhood. They ran down the driveway of the house across the street and when the first one tried to turn it slipped on the asphalt and slid right through the garage door, bringing the whole thing down. At least, that’s the story I heard secondhand.
Until the time when you have your own garden, perhaps a few container tomato or pepper plants would be fun.
You know, I think that to myself every year, and it’s one of those things I just never get around too. I could set up a nice balcony garden.
Maybe 2024 will be the year I do so.
I want to do it as well. I even went as far as watching some videos about it. FYI you should not use just any container. I did not know that. There are food grade plastic containers. I thought any plastic would work, but apparently some that are not marked as food grade which can leach contaminants into the plants and therefore the food!
That’s good to know. That seems like the sort of thing I would definitely overlook.
The first has such a mournfulness quality to it, a feeling that often overcomes a gardener at the end of season, when the winter is knocking. Your second may have just prompted a poem of my own - I've been a bit stumped. Bloody dirt, everywhere!
I love the image of the deer waiting. I had a similar moment driving up from the coast at dusk on Saturday night - two huge roos in the middle of the road, watching. It was for all the world like they were ready to hold court in the middle of the road, and were just waiting for me to pass.
Reading your comment, I just realized how little I know about kangaroos. Growing up, deer were a common sight. I can imagine them holding court in the middle of the road the way you say the kangaroos that you saw the other night did. I can imagine them nibbling on leafy greens and destroying a garden.
But when I substitute deer for kangaroos, suddenly I wonder, are the kangaroos upright, or are they leaning forward on all fours like deer would be? Do they even stand like that? Are they a pest to farmers like deer can be? Do you have to build fences to keep them out of your garden?
So many questions. 🤣
Kangaroos are the equivalent of deer, though if you have an ordinary fence they don't seem to intentionally jump over to eat your veggies! They are absolutely pests to farmers, and in boom times they reach plague proportions.
They stand upright on their muscley tails and hind legs.
When I was in the UK, the deer reminded me of the roos. They can have that big square face too. And they can stare at you from the edges of the day like deer will. There's also different kinds from the smaller wallabies to the large Eastern Greys we have around here and i met on the road.
The red ones are pretty bulky and muscley, especially the males!
The bulky red ones look slightly terrifying. 🤣
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