This was originally sent as a newsletter for Of Pens & Paintbrushes. If you’d like to get this directly in your inbox, you can sign up here, at the Newsletter sign up page.
First: There’s about a dozen new original paintings in the shop, some very affordable sterling silver hoops that I make entirely by hand, the matching copper version of the silver stacking rings, and quite a few lovely calligraphy nib holders. (Plus the usual pens and one of a kind jewelry pieces and note cards.)
Second: I didn’t write last week. It was an intense week on parenting and personal fronts and I couldn’t bring even a hint of my decent self to the blank screen to write. I cried a lot, and wanted to burn the world down more often. That said, I might switch to a every other week schedule after this last week – the time off gave me time to think and work a bit more, and I think I can find the kind of words I want to write to you with a bit more time to think.
And off we go.
My middle son, creatively referred to as Middle in public spaces, was born on Halloween. Unlike many people born on holidays, Middle has been enamored with all things Halloween for pretty much as long as he’s understood it existed. We have Halloween decorations up somewhere pretty much year-round, and he plans out his costume in detail each year. Yet even his enjoyment of the annual costume planning pales in comparison to his love of pumpkins. He doesn’t even need to carve them – he simply loves pumpkins. He (and we) have tried repeatedly with zero success to grow pumpkins, and so he switched from trying to grow them to asking for store bought pumpkins, yes plural, instead. This year, after another failed attempt at growing pumpkins last year, he bought his own pumpkin – a pretty good sized one – and it sat, from the beginning of October until after Christmas, on the corner coffee table.
After Christmas, it started collapsing in a bit, and he asked me what to do with it.
“Put it in the compost bucket on the porch! No point in wasting good compost material, right?”
So he did. It took about a month, but what the possums, raccoons, and small other critters didn’t eat slowly turned into lovely compost.
Now, while Middle loves pumpkins, I tend to gravitate towards growing peppers and tomatoes. They do a bit better in our heat and humidity, and in our climate that sees only the rarest frost. I have a bit of a knack for growing them, too, and somehow managed to grow a dozen or so wonky little mutant bell pepper plants from seeds taken out of a grocery store bell pepper. I was honestly just impressed that anything sprouted at all, seeing as how commercial agriculture is almost exclusively hybrids, and those seeds rarely produce anything, and almost never resembling the fruit it came from. (It doesn’t, by the way, they’re small, but they taste REALLY good.)
I recently had to put some of my mutant pepper plants into bigger pots, and, because I am a frugal nut who refuses to buy dirt, I just amended our newly-relocated-into-pots sandy soil with bamboo leaves from our timber bamboo and a bit of our kitchen scrap (and pumpkin) compost for a boost.
It wasn’t a week later when fat, healthy leaves of bright green started pushing up through the surface of the pepper pot dirt. Ten pairs of them… and exactly right on time for when the local almanac says to plant pumpkins.
The volunteer pumpkin plants are in their own pots now, because they get pretty big rather fast. The timing of it all reminds me that some of the rules we have aren’t made up for profit – some are observations of what the world around us would do with or without us involved. It doesn’t matter how much you want tomatoes in the dead of winter or lettuce in the blistering heat of summer – those things aren’t meant to grow then, and will wait until circumstances are right before they do. It’s a hard lesson to learn: sometimes, it’s not the right time or circumstances for you to have what you want, and trying to force it will just leave you struggling fruitlessly. Sometimes you have to survive the heat of the compost pile and spend some time waiting in the dark before you end up in the right conditions to sprout and grow, tucked up under the leaves of mutant peppers no one thought would survive either.
There is a strange kind of wholly unexpected synchronicity in life that occurs when you do what you can with what you have, when you keep learning in every way you can as best you can, while you wait in that deep dark heat of the metaphorical compost bucket. Then, right about the time you’re so immersed in living that you forget you’re waiting: pumpkins.
Wishing you unexpected pumpkins of your own,
A. Markov
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This was originally sent as a newsletter for Of Pens & Paintbrushes. If you’d like to get this directly in your inbox, you can sign up here, at the Newsletter sign up page.