I squash and squeeze
A quick garden check-in, featuring very little time and a scrap of flash fiction.
No one’s especially happy with the weather, are they? But my dad, along with every other crop farmer, takes it personally. Who can blame him? At this time of year, every single drop of rain jostling the soggy-but-ripe wheat is an affront. Harvest’s on hold ‘til the sun puts its hat on. Clear the decks, please, clouds.
My garden’s having an incredible time, though, in that for once it’s not spending the August parched and gasping for life. Instead, it grows lush and green, tempting me out for a PJ-cloaked potter in the fleeting morning sunshine — cup of tea in one hand, Arthur on my hip, everything I should really be doing (getting dressed, changing his nappy, checking my emails) popped on mute.
I learned very quickly that Arthur can’t be trusted to gently stroke a flower. He starts well — fingertip brushing petal — but then his fist closes menacingly over the top like a Venus Fly Trap, and it’s crushed in his little baby hand then ripped from its stem and cast upon the ground, all with an expression of wide-eyed, cherub-cheeked innocence, as though that’s what I must have been asking him to do all along.
So I’ve not let him anywhere near my squash. And I have lots of those, finally, including three absolutely minute ‘Pacific Giant’ pumpkins that I now check on morning and night, poking through the leaves with eyes narrowed to search for slugs. It reminds me of a short story I published last year on my studio’s newsletter, so — as I haven’t had chance to write anything new — I thought I’d share it again here.
Enjoy! And may your courgettes be chaotically, overwhelmingly abundant, romping across the garden with joyful abandon.
Bye. 🥒
First pick
She sits at her tiny kitchen table. Set before her: one single courgette, shining vibrant green against the scratched wood and tessellated mug rings. She’s never been much of a cook, hasn’t been up to it lately even if she was any good in the kitchen. But she managed this, so —
She picks up the courgette, turns it over in her hands, brushes a thumb over the bristly skin. Hasn’t it earned it? Flourishing against the odds in a bag for life bulging with parched supermarket compost? Trusting in someone who can’t be counted on to brush her own teeth, let alone look after a plant? Not that it had a choice, once she’d claimed it impulsively from the staff room; a free-to-a-good-home greenhouse hopeful that hadn’t made the allotment cut.
She flicks through her phone. Looks anxiously at the courgette. Back at her screen. Then scrapes back her chair and leaves, returning later to tumble groceries over a sticky worktop. She pores over the recipe as she chops and drizzles, mumbling back the instructions once, twice, unsure. The bacon crackles and spits oil. The grated courgette clings to her fingers as she pummels the garlic. Salted water hisses and bubbles over the lip of the saucepan; she swears and wrenches down the heat, furious to be messing up the easy bit, like always, typical, as the kitchen fills with steam and stress.
But then she lays the table with mismatched cutlery.
Pours a glass of not-quite-cold white wine.
And she sits down with a bowl of pasta that she made, ribboned green with a courgette she grew, in the late summer of a year spent too bone and heart-tired to do much at all.
Outside is a bag. Inside the bag is a single plant, vines spilling over the sides and rambling across the cracked concrete yard. And on the vines, tiny, flower-tipped courgettes, watching quietly as someone slowly remembers how to be.