Late Harvest

I spent Saturday morning trying to tidy up the garden and pick the last of the fruit before threatened storms. As I worked I hummed a harvest hymn to myself.

Harvest Festivals can be very twee. While the concept isn't as fraught with controversy as Thanksgiving, it's very easy to get it wrong and make it neither a genuine celebration of and for the local farmers who still do exist in this green and pleasant land, or a true call to look at the politics of food. I remember very well the time when the congregation were happily if rather tunelessly singing "All is Safely Gathered In" and C, whose farmer husband had had a stroke in the spring and who had been left trying to care for him and run the farm on her own hissed "no it f*cking isn't"

She was right about her own grain harvest which had been delayed by rain, she was right in a wider sense. All is NEVER safely gathered in. Many many things are left undone, or partly done, or just can't be completed. I've done what I can in the garden. I'll leave the rest for the birds. The same will have to apply to many things in life. I can only do my best and those threads that I leave dangling may just be the seeds that grow into something interesting next year.