The other garden beds have been cleared, raked, seeded with green manure, and covered with a layer of compost. The garlic cloves, in anticipation of summer, have been nestled under ground. The garden has been put to bed.
Except for the kale. Like curled ribbons tying closed a wrapped gift, the rich green leaves stretch a line of residual giggles across the garden. Little horticultural alleluias punctuating the season's end.
We should clip the lot of them - blanch them, squeeze away the excess water, and freeze them for later use. And we will. It's too good to waste; too nutritious to neglect. But we procrastinate, reticent to erase this last echo of summer, this resplendent beauty, this resounding testament to the sweetness the cold can evoke. Indeed, this hardy brassica is actually improved by the frost.
It is not, after all, an abstract consideration. Despite the temperate days that have been the norm these autumn days, cold is in the forecast for later this week - lows in the teens and highs just barely above freezing. Cold, and the likelihood of measurable snow. Winter may toy with us, but it will eventually arrive full-throttle. And "sweetness" isn't the first descriptor that comes to mind with the shivers. We are more likely to resemble the Swiss chard that, until recently, joined the sturdier greens in the row - once proud and stately plants now browned, bent and brittled. Thus the kale, in resilient contrast, as inspiration. There, as the garden's final promenade of the season, their leafy curliness reorients, nourishes and beckons. The row stands as our own very green and present expression of Mary Oliver's observation that,
The kale is all that remains in the garden. But it is enough to ask the question, and encourage the response of our sweet and curly living.
