Ingrid Bruck

My Garden Waits

Guests are gone, the house quiet. Vegetables need picking. It’s too hot to work. July heat presses in twelve daylight hours. I wait for late afternoon to set up the sprinkler and water plants. Blackberry bushes are heavy with fruit. Tree limbs droop in the home orchard. Green beans, tomatoes, wildflowers are thirsty. Each half hour I move the sprinkler, last to the purple hosta. In grass past my ankles, I reach for a windfall stick, note its strange black curve and gleaming heft, the diameter of my one-year-old granddaughter’s arm. When it moves, I scream and scare a corn snake. It slithers along the barn, longer than I’m tall. I move the sprinkler and retreat inside where it’s cool.

midsummer fireworks silent lightning bugs