We got back on a Thursday night, too late to see anything, and I went out the next morning with coffee and stood at the edge of the beds for a long moment before I understood what I was looking at. Two weeks of heat and one heavy storm and nobody home. The pigweed was past my knee. The squash had collapsed in on itself, hollow at the base, the way they do when the borers get in. Something had been at the cabbages and left the ribs. There were tomatoes on the ground in a state I will not describe closely, and the smell of them was the first thing I had noticed even before I looked down.
I had been away because my mother had gone into the hospital, and she was going to be all right, and I was more tired than I had been in years. I set the coffee on the step and did not pick it back up until it was cold.
The month before it had already been bad
The yard did not fail in those two weeks. It failed over about six, and the two weeks away were only when the bill came due. June had been hot early and I had not kept up with the watering. I had lost a whole planting of carrots to a crust of dry soil that the seedlings never got through and had not replanted, because by then it felt like there was no point. The compost had gone anaerobic and sour because I had stopped turning it in May.
I mention that because at the time I told myself the trip was the cause. It was not. The trip removed the last bit of propping up I was doing, and the whole thing came down at once, and it was easier to blame the two weeks than to look at the six.
The evening with the hose
That Sunday I went out to water what was left and ended up sitting on the back step with the hose running into a bed for a good deal longer than it needed, watching the water pool and run off the dry soil instead of soaking in, which is its own particular kind of discouraging.
What I was thinking, honestly, was that I could mow all of it. Rent a sod cutter, take the beds out, put it back to grass, and have my Saturdays. I costed it out in my head. I got fairly far into it. I thought about the relief of driving past a garden center in April and feeling nothing in particular. I want to be clear that this was not a passing bad mood at the end of a hard day. I sat with it for the better part of a week and I meant it.
What I let die on purpose
What I did instead, mostly out of not having the energy to make a decision that large, was pick one bed. The one nearest the door, the original one, the one I had cut out with my mother’s bread knife. I weeded that bed over two evenings and I watered it and I did nothing at all to any of the others.
The rest of the yard I let go. Deliberately, with the pigweed going to seed in it, which anyone who gardens will tell you is a decision I paid for the following two summers and they are right. I pulled the dead squash and left the holes. The cabbages stayed as they were until October. That was the first year I ever chose to let something die rather than losing it by accident, and it felt worse than the accidents did, and it was also the only reason I did not quit altogether.
What I did not say to anyone
I did not tell anybody how close I came. Not my husband, not my sister, and certainly not in anything I wrote at the time. What I posted that September was a photograph of the one bed I had saved, cropped so that the wreck behind it was out of frame, and a cheerful line about late beans. That was not a lie exactly. It was a very carefully chosen truth.
I think about that when I read other people now. The August that nearly ended this for me left almost no trace anywhere, and I have to assume the same is true of most of what I see. Whatever anyone shows you in August, somebody’s yard fell apart that month, and they cropped it out.
How it started again
The following March I did not plan a season. I could not face it. I went out one afternoon and worked on that same near bed and put in the things I knew, beans and lettuce and the tomatoes I would buy as starts, and I made no decision at all about the other beds until May. Two of them I did nothing with that whole year. One of them I put down cardboard and chips on and left, and it was the best soil in the yard by the time I opened it up again.
The yard was smaller that year than it had been the year before, and it was the first year I did not resent it in July. I would not have chosen the way I learned that lesson. I had to actually hit the wall before I would let anything shrink, and I suspect that is true of more people than say so.
What I think about it now
I do not think of that August as a failure of commitment. I think I had built something that needed a version of me that did not exist during a hard summer, and it did what such things do. The part I would keep is that I picked one bed instead of deciding about all of them, not because that is a principle but because on that particular Sunday, one bed was the largest thing I could hold. It turned out to be enough to keep going, which I did not know at the time and would not have believed.