What’s Done Is Done

As the full moon rose, the people who had waited were not disappointed.

The light was as revealing as the sun’s, except that the lines it carved around things — a lover’s outstretched hand, a dog running toward, even a tree — is silver, etched and not the multicolor fiction we are used to. The shadows cast are somehow denser, not slender silhouettes but rather rounded duplicates of ourselves.

Children, normally addicted to other screens, hold their hands above shirtless bellies and laugh at the touch that is not touching.

Adults mainly converse as to how beautiful it is; little can enter this picture but the simple awe of planetary play across our peaceful land.

Friends try to define, so they can remember, what color the moon was as it illuminated all these subtle things surrounding us.

Wisps of land fog run like rivers across the cropland; the clouds flow toward the lowest spot and pool into an imaginary pond right before your eyes.

Finally, rain. Summer enters her final week, and vegetable farmers get to take a break from the irrigation routines and expansions that have been preoccupying us since May.

At the same moment most of our compatriots pack up their summer dresses to return to work or school, the farmer feels the pressure drop. From a row crop perspective, what’s done is done.

I consider the calendar and where things stand. We were later than ever getting our broccoli and cabbage in the ground. Grown in such high heat, and with no real rain, the transplants were small. Now, in real dirt, with real rain, they don’t seem like such a long shot. “We will cover them if we have to,” I proclaim, but we don’t need to yet.

With rain, both the failing and the fall crops are invigorated. Withered cucumbers send out runners, and where there are successive plantings of things like beets and carrots, things that can withstand hard frost, the greens become robust. It happens in hours — everything is revived.

The home greenhouse is covered with shade cloth, and some of the benches are covered with seedlings. All this will be planted in our hoop houses, a job that is two weeks away. Their subsequent harvest takes us into January, if our plans work out. On the other benches is the onion crop that we thought we’d lost.

The onions were presumed lost because we couldn’t get water to their field. I had made the choice to plant them “au natural,” without plastic mulch, because even if it’s biodegradable it has a cost. But I regretted my choice when we did not have time to hand-weed them, and the lambs quarters reigned supreme.

I grew dispirited when the full symphony of weeds — purslane, pigweed, summer grasses — quickly out-competed our crop and, seeing no rain in the forecast, I gave up and stopped tending the storage onions altogether.

Everything has a cost — it’s one of the reasons farmers in general are compelled to save and salvage.

The other day, when there was finally enough time to mow the onion mess down, with low expectations, a crew went out to scavenge what they could. But Instead of a scant collection, they pulled scores.

And because it was so dry, the same thing that nearly wrecked the onions, preserved them. Those that managed to mature simply dried, their outside papery perfect even while still in the dirt.

It seems like good luck, and it even feels like it for a while, not like we’d planted something, but like we’d struck gold.