Squash, Strawberries and Covid-19

Mid summer, last year, we had a great abundance of squash: delicata, acorn and pumpkins. They were getting larger each day, their veins of green slowly growing and stretching trying on their mature colors. I was dreaming of the striped, green, and orange bulbuous squash they would become.

And yet, though I was hardly surprised, each vine one by one was attacked by squash vine borers.  These bugs setting their eggs in tiny holes and then their larva feeding off the work of roots and vines. First a wilt would set in and I knew they were done for.  To make matters worse  a dusty mold finished off  any lingering hopes of mature fruit.  Finally, the invasive stink bugs made meals of the green sweet squash.

It was no surprise.  All of these pests are common in a midwestern garden in a midwestern summer.  It's why rotation is so important here and also why its hard to have a small garden where rotation is near impossible.

But what got me thinking about squash this morning, and what got me thinking about gardening in general is that since the covid-19 virus pandemic I have been watching our strawberry patch slowly come to life. I keep thinking, "the stawberries don't know about the carona virus."  It has sort of become my mantra for the awe I feel that despite so much change in the ordinary lives of people around me, light and roots and plants and animal keep doing what the sun has inspired them to do.

And this is it for me.
That the whole world is not just us people.
The whole world is all sorts of alive things.  It is squash, and berries, and trillium, and trees, and birds, and squirrels.   Each of these alive things with their own sorts of enemies and pandemics.  (Many of these pandemics caused by people).

We watched the bluebirds in our backyard inspecting a birdhouse we have and they didn't seem worried about housecats at all.

The strawberries are not worried about a late frost or too much rain.

The tree along the banks of the creek are not worried about their roots being loosened by flooding.

It isn't that I am NOT worried about the pandemic.
It isn't that I am NOT concerned about what a virus is looking like to my fellow people.
I am very very concerned.

It is that I also feel like we are more connected to our nature than ever. That we are animals. We are subject to suffering and viruses and our own vine borers.  And we as a species have a lot in common with each other.  We are bound up with a shared set of vulnerabilities in our bodies and in our ways of being alive.

As people, as a species with brains and science and art and complex feelings and movement and such I am glad to use the tools to get through this, to stay alive, to grow and learn and make.  I am honored to be a person.

But more and more, for me, I feel the ways that being a person is perhaps more connected to being a squash vine or a strawberry or a tree who has fallen across the stream than I am to being a God, or a master of my universe or any sort of controling agent.