We turn to the West

Fall is coming. Even though the heat of summer lingers, there are more leaves on the ground. Vegetation is beginning to die back, if it made it through the heat, except for the sweet potatoes that almost long to be harvested. Soon I’ll recheck the banana-like cluster just below the surface.

When their size suits me, I’ll dig by hand around them and gently lift them out. Their flesh is moist and tears easily, and I’ll cure them in a place where air can circulate all around them.

It would be if I had the space, the time to pull back the watermelon vine for all the hidden gems. Five Sun and Stars melons this year, and I have figured out how to tell they are ripe. Just as the sun sets gradually shifts a bit north, we shift too as we see the aging of the garden.

West is a direction of completion and maturity, of dreaming, the source of water, the place and time of transformation--a kind of death. And so it is, in some ways, as the light fades a bit and we see more space between the branches of the trees