Kirsten Vangsness

Copious plum tomatoes, sweet cherry tomatoes, dust-colored heirloom ones.

The green peppers turned out good, too, a little on the small side, but close to regular size.

You had so many that you kept foisting them onto your friends, who, it turned out, also had a bumper crop of green peppers in their gardens.

They probably gave your green peppers away to other friends until finally all the peppers rotted and got thrown away.

And remember earlier in the summer when your lettuce came up?

That was fun, right?

The lettuce was delicious.

After you ate it all, you could have planted more.

Would it have grown and had a whole second crop?

Maybe even a third.

Why didn't you do that?

Oh, that's right.

Because each head of lettuce took seven hours to clean.

Even after you washed each leaf individually under the faucet and then added them dry with paper towels, entire forests died to make the paper towels you used to blot one head of lettuce.

The leaves still had invisible specks of unpleasantly crunchy dirt in them.

Also, some of the leaves had revolting slugs stuck to them, and you had to walk those leaves outside so you could flick off the slugs.

Years of watching your Buddhist friends gently coax spiders onto pieces of paper and carrying them outdoors have made you feel guilty about killing living things, even gross ones.

And if the whole reincarnation thing has any credence, which you doubt, but, you know, stranger things have turned out to be true, any slug could be your second grade teacher.

Mrs. Trevanti, who you loved.

Oh look, Google says there's still time to plant Swiss chard before the first frost.