2 weeks Ago By JANELL SHAH Special to the Yakima Herald-Republic
As summer turns into autumn, quite a few family members and friends have been sharing their frustration with this summer. Between housework, illness, unfortunately death and the day-to-day grind of work and life as whole, the most common phrase I’ve heard is, “It’s hard not to pine for what summer should have been.” It really seems that a lot of people around me have been going through a difficult human experience as of late, and I’m sorry for anyone else out in the world that’s also been struggling.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of “what ifs” and “what could have been,” I’m very guilty of playing that game myself, but I’ve found that it’s easier to stand on a soapbox than it is to take your own advice. Most prevalent amongst the “could have been” summer sorrows this year is my husband’s grief over his garden. I am not a gardener, so I can only pretend to understand the depth of sorrow that plagues his mind when comparing this year’s garden to last year’s garden.
I will divulge though, it’s been relentless. Every few days for months, the comparison between last year’s tomatoes and this year’s is made; how few plants he has this year, the size of the eggplants, it goes on and on. This year one of our dear friend’s has a mega-garden.
Monstrous, beautiful and filled to the brim with every vegetable you can imagine and then some; seeing this labor of love and art only deepens the comparison. And we all know that comparison is the thief of joy. A few weeks ago, I finally snapped.
Ever since the pandemic hit, it feels like time has been turned up a notch and everything is so busy all the time, and the pressure we all put on ourselves to maintain productivity at all times is so infuriating. The sentence, “Some years are garden years and some years are house improvement years and some years are just for getting through each day and that’s okay!” rang loud in our home. Instead of letting him continue to beat himself up, I cranked up some bee-bop music, grabbed a box and dragged him outside to start harvesting the garden in its current form.
We meticulously stripped the basil, gently picked each tomato off its vine, carefully plucked each eggplant and pepper from their respective boxes. The mood quickly became jovial with the excitement of harvesting the fruits of labor (no matter how small). We lugged our box of garden goodies into the kitchen and spent the night washing, cutting, roasting and canning our treasure.
Luckily, supermarkets exist, so although the garden wasn’t substantial this year and we “only” canned a dozen jars of sauce, we surely won’t starve at the peak of winter thanks to modern technology. Instead of being a metric of failure, our small garden was reinstated to its original purpose: a fun, cathartic way to feed ourselves sometimes while learning a few life lessons along the way. Harvesting what was there, even if it wasn't a “bountiful” year, turned the disappointment of a “failed garden” into something productive and meaningful.
The changing of the seasons always makes me pause to reflect, and this year I’m reminded of how incredibly easy it is to feel discouraged and how hard it can be to be kind to yourself. I’ve previously talked about existential nihilism and the idea that “nothing matters." Nothing matters, which means that everything matters.
Embracing that concept helps me navigate life as it makes it easier to have fun, accept things as they are (even if I struggle with that sometimes) and helps me try my best to expect nothing while appreciating everything. Please take this as a gentle reminder that no matter how your summer went, no matter what trials and tribulations you may have gone through and no matter how you wish this last season had gone as compared to how it actually went, it’s okay. There’s grace in accepting the ebb and flow of seasons.
Whatever your summer looked like, it is what it is, but you can go into this next season with kindness towards yourself and others, and hopefully the time and space to slow down and recover from a very busy year. Even if your summer fell short of expectations, I hope you can still harvest moments of peace, resilience and hope. Those are the moments that help us grow and reinforce that every season has its purpose.
• Janell Shah is a wandering biologist who calls the Lower Yakima Valley home..
