A Good Year for Beets
by ragpants
 
 

Kathryn Janeway straightened and knuckled a strand of hair out of her eyes. The garden was doing well this year despite the late summer heat. She balanced her metal-mesh basket with an ease born of years of practice between her hip and elbow and carefully considered her garden. It looked as if it might be a good year for beets.

She squinted beyond the carefully tended rows of greens at the peach trees beyond. The fruit was swelling nicely now and beginning to blush. The ripe peaches would be welcome when they came in a week or two. Sighing, she gathered her produce to walk back to the house.

Her garden, she wondered if her mother would laugh at her now, as she clucked possessively over her garden. As a child, Kathryn had been devious in her excuses to avoid her turn at chores in the community garden, but here she was now, an adult and more,  sentimentalizing over her garden. She decided that her mother would be pleased and would try very hard not to laugh at her foibles now--at the woman she had become. Her garden. It had seen her through so much, had taught her much. She remember the first garden she had planted--it had been a necessity at the time--on New Earth. An experiment rendered null when Tuvok's call came. But something about the elementalness of it, the act of nurturing made her want to try again.  Her next garden had been planted here at this very site where she had returned year after year to work the earth and take pride in the results of her own hands.

Chakotay had turned the soil for her garden here their first year together. He did the hard labor of cutting the dense sod and breaking the clay earth while she had, in her typical way, waved a blueprint  of her plans at him and chided him or not following her directions. When he had cheerfully ignored her, she had thrown a small clod of dirt at him, hitting him in the back. That clod was followed by another, and then another as he returned her fire. Soon they were both dirty and laughing and rolling on the ground as he pulled off his work gloves and his fingers worked their way up beneath her shirt. They hadn't had much of garden that year--little more than a single forlorn tomato plant and a few overzealous zucchini. But it was a beginning. That fall they had planted the beginning of their orchard: two peach cultivars, an antique variety of apple and, for some reason she couldn't quite remember now, a black walnut tree.

The next year they expanded their original garden plot, perhap more able to concentrate on the work because she was already pregnant and Chakotay was oh-so-protective of the her and the child she carried. Their son, Xochi, was born late that summer during the height of tomato season--it was a good year for tomatoes that year. Too good. Kathryn had insisted on planting a dozen vines when 4 or 5 would have yielded plenty for their needs. She remembered creeping out from her nap to find that Chaktotay  had propped his three day old son upon the counter and was diligently explaining too him how to peel and seed tomatoes and prepare them for canning. He spoke in a melodious and rapid language full of clicks and glottal stops-- his native tongue she'd guessed and she wondered why she never heard him use it before. She watched as he carefully lifted the red globe in front of the infant's gaze and described how to tell a too ripe tomato from a perfectly ripe one. Kathryn could have told him that Xochi couldn't possibly see beyond his tightly knotted baby fist, but she didn't. She just as quietly returned to her nap, reassured that despite his reservations, Chakotay was going to make a wonderful father.

It was good year for grapes a few summers later when they had laughed at Xochi who hid with his big black dog under the arching grapevine behind the arbor and shared the nearly ripe fruit with his pet. Both would pay for their indulgence later, but for now they were happy.  Chakotay had laughed with her then, but later turn silent when she told him that Xochi would have a brother in the spring. He was unhappy at first with the news--citing both their careers and their ages as argument. Eventually he seemed resigned to the fact and even happy as her pregnancy progressed.

There was no garden the year that Edmund was born. She was too tired from a difficult pregnancy and a fussy new baby  to bother with cultivating a garden. And it seemed that Chakotay was away for most of that spring and summer.

Soon the boys were trailing after her in the garden. Pulling weeds and collecting snails. They  proudly accompanied her to her office, carrying the bags of excess produce to share with her staff. Corn or tomatoes or apples.  Or whatever else it was good year for.  And it was always a good year in the garden for the boys. There was always something fresh and growing, ready to pick and nibble on. Carrots they pulled themselves or plums snitched off trees.

It was a good year for cucumbers Kathryn was thinking as she stood in her garden contemplating making pickles as a preemptive strike designed to ward off bushel baskets of cucumbers later in the season when Chakotay came to her and told her he was leaving. There was a war going on somewhere and he was needed to help these people fight for their independence. He had to go. He didn't think the insurrection would last more than a few months.  He had already tendered his resignation to Star Fleet and he would be back as soon as he could. She looked up at him and nodded. She had known this day would come. That the restlessness that was essential to his nature would rise one day. It was a part of him that she could no more eradicate than she could the white gnats that swarmed around her tomatoes. And so she wished him a safe journey and a speedy return and wondered if she made pickles who would help her eat them now.

The years waxed and waned. Her early season peach tree bore a particularly heavy crop and the weight of the fruit and the stress of the wind split its truck. The tree died and she planted a another one. Xochi grew to be nearly as tall as is father had been. And she drafted him to help her dig a new  garden bed and planted herbs whose heady smells lingered well after frost and which she dried to bring their scents into the house. She enlarged her garden and planted new and exotic vegetables, trying to discover what non-Terran fruits and vegetables she could grow. Spican horned squash proved to be a nuisance and she never planted it again,  but the Nidean brakleberries grew well with only a minimum of coaxing and made an excellent cobbler. And Xochi could always be lured home from the Academy for a weekend when he knew she was baking one.

The year she retired from StarFleet had been marked by a late, wet spring and heavy muddy soil that rotted all the seeds of her early season crops. Her staff had teased her when the expected early season offering of onions, lettuce and spinach didn't appear that they knew she was going to retire because her garden was slowing down and obviously needed her full-time attention. With Kathryn Janeway in full time attendance, they said,  it wouldn't  dare slack off so much. Maybe it was true. Edmund would be leaving for the Sorbonne in the fall for graduate studies in history and Federation politics, and to intern at the Federation's Congress.  She would be alone with her garden. Her garden needed her or perhaps she needed it.  She couldn't say which statement were more true.

She straightened and shifted her basket on her hip and looked toward the house. Xochi was walking toward her backlit by the sun. But it couldn't be. He was aboard the Holyoke on his first space exploration assignment. Yet it couldn't be Edmund; he hadn't the height or the breadth of whoever was walking toward her. It almost looked like....but it couldn't be. He had left her years ago. Left her and her garden and her sons.  She closed her eyes against the apparition and wondered if she were dying. If this were a vision inspired by a hemorrhage in her brain or a clot in her lungs. But when she opened her eyes the image was still there--and now even closer.  It was him--the man she had thought of as dead for years now. It hurt less that way. To believe that he was dead than to know that he had chosen to desert her and leave her to raise their sons alone.

He stood there, at the edge of her garden,  awkward and uncomfortable. "Kathryn," he began but whatever words he intended to come after died unspoken. He nodded toward the garden, " The garden looks like it's doing well."

"Yes,"  she answered slowly, looking out into the garden,  "It's going to be good year for beets."