Letter No. 18: What We Grow Around

This morning, I noticed an unusual squash among the pile of squash and pumpkins in our mudroom.

It was large and yellow, with several pieces of wire protruding from its sides. Most squash do not come with hardware, so I picked it up for a closer look.

The wire had not been wrapped around it after harvest. The squash had grown within one of the fence openings, expanding until the wire became embedded in its sides. Its smooth shape was interrupted by narrow channels where the fruit had pressed against the wire and continued growing on either side.

Earlier in the season, Selena had installed wire fencing with two-by-four-inch openings in the garden. She hoped the vines would climb the fencing and keep the squash from resting on the ground.

The wire was intended to provide support.

As this particular squash grew, the opening around it became too small to contain it. The wire remained where it was, while the squash continued to enlarge. Slowly, the fruit accommodated the obstruction. Its shape changed around something that would not move.

By harvest, the wire was no longer merely beside the squash. It had become embedded in it.

Selena cut the squash free from the larger section of fencing but left several short pieces of wire behind. When I asked why she had not removed them, her answer was wonderfully uncomplicated: she did not know how to cut them away.

So there it sat in the mudroom—part produce and part fencing project.

I carried it outside and held it in the morning light. From one angle, it looked like an ordinary squash. Turn it slightly, and the wire appeared. The obstruction had not prevented its growth, but neither had the squash escaped without being shaped by it.

There was something familiar about that.

Much of life requires us to adjust to things we cannot move. We learn to work around limitations, responsibilities, disappointments, expectations, and circumstances we did not choose. Sometimes the thing we adjust to was even intended to help us. It may have begun as protection, structure, instruction, or support.

But living things keep growing, and not every structure grows with them.

The squash did what living things often do. It adapted. It found room where it could and continued becoming what it was made to become.

There is something admirable in that, but adaptation is not the same as freedom. The squash kept growing, yet the wire still influenced its shape. Its ability to accommodate the obstruction did not make the obstruction disappear.

I wonder how often I have done the same.

There are habits, expectations, and old ways of thinking I may have learned to live around so successfully that I no longer notice their presence. I have adjusted my movements, narrowed certain possibilities, or changed my shape without remembering why.

After enough time, an accommodation can begin to feel like identity.

We may say, “This is simply who I am,” when part of what we are seeing is the outline of something we learned to survive, satisfy, avoid, or work around.

That does not mean every mark must be removed. Some cannot be. Some should not be. The unusual shape of the squash is not evidence that it failed to grow. It is evidence that growth continued under less-than-ideal conditions.

Still, the wire is worth noticing.

The squash remains in the mudroom with the other produce from the garden. It is still unmistakably a squash, but it also carries the outline of what stood in its way.

Looking at it, I am left with a question I suspect is larger than anything Selena intended when she put up the fence.

What have I grown around for so long that I now mistake its outline for my own?

Until next Sunday…

George

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