Not Having What We Want, But Wanting What We Have

“Gnarled sweet potatoes, tips curling like the feet of witches. Hubbard squashes, big enough to sit on, warty, blue. Mushrooms flaring their gills. Back in July, the tomatoes and corn the farmers offered were cheery, Crayola-bright. October is scary: it holds every child’s most despised vegetable in its wrinkled claw. . . .

“The vegetables of summer are easy to love, as it is easy to find young men and women beautiful, to promise commitment before it has been tested, to be happy beneath a cloudless sky. I’m still not sure it’s natural to prefer what’s difficult and unwieldy, to feel affection warts-and-all. But the world is older and slower and more patient than we ever will be.

"These vegetables keep, and have helped every generation before ours survive long winters. They are part of the great practice of not having what we want, but wanting what we have, and after years of trying – of trying and trying – my husband and I have both come to love, even crave, beets and butternut squash, the hard vegetables of fall. We appreciate their complexity. We find them very good.”

(Katrina Vandenberg, Orion magazine)