september 1974

The fall garden is beginning to produce: Squash - so much that some goes unnoticed and unpicked, turnip greens, okra, cantaloupes. I haven't had too many bug problems, just aphids and three squash bugs. Soap and water for aphids - wash each leaf on 100 cucumber plants; primitive dance on the squash bugs to flatten them.

I've been clearing mesquites to expand the garden - I've gotten to love the twisted desert shapes of their roots, as big as trunks of 20 year-old elms - weathered like an alligator juniper on Utah hills, dark, muscled wood against the red of the earth. Each one comes out slowly, axe and mattock my only tools. On a hot afternoon the smell of the coal oil that I slosh on the stubs of the roots rises and thickens the air.

The cottontail "licktety-split" comes and dines on fresh green cabbage shoots; she checks out everything else and then decides the cabbage is best. The cat has given up chasing her and lies sleeping twenty feet from the rabbit. The cat leaves it up to me to lead the rabbit away. "Lickety-split" walks a couple of yards in front of me, stopping when I decide she is far enough from the garden. She never runs, we've all befriended her. She feeds ten feet from me, relaxed, accepting my presence.

The hummingbirds keep coming, new arrivals in addition to the family that lives here. They are feathers on arrows of evening sunlight - a magic, ever present now. I will miss them this winter. I lived in a tent under a cottonwood one autumn and watched many a leaf fall - the mock battles of the hummers are as subtle and gentle as a cottonwood leaf coming to ground.

The only thing I miss is the sound of water, but this month I've had enough rain to make me wish I'd settled in the Sahara. My crops are dying now - they need sunlight. The squash and cantaloupes are thriving but everything else is waiting for the sun to appear to get them high and living again. The vegetables seem to be sinking into the mud.

Habits of the inhabitants here have changed, the turtles only feed at night, the snakes are out in the daytime. I don't sleep in the after­noon anymore; the day is too short now. Forces are at work, things I don't understand - even a slight change in the weather or a hummer investigating me from a foot away affects me.  I've begun to let the land speak to me, as it speaks to the quail who've raised three families here, as it speaks to the Green Heron which caught toads in a rain puddle in the path across the vacant lot to the west.  Winter is coming on, winter is coming on ---

Are you safe? Are you safe?