Pumpkins

Rotting, tattered leaf shreds and brown shrivelled vines looked ugly underneath the vibrantly green growth of new leaves, vines, huge yellow flowers and curling tendrils of my climbing pumpkin plants. I started to chop them off, thinking the trellis would look so much more attractive with just the good looking parts on display. Curiously, as I chopped off the old, mostly dead vines, the new vines started falling off the trellis. What was going on? I looked carefully underneath and realized the new, tender vines and tendrils had piggybacked on the older ones. When I cut the old ones off, the new ones lost their foothold, their support structure on which they had their hold. I left the rest of the old brown, yellowing growth to simply fall off on its own so I wouldn't have all the new plants collapsing off the trellis. It reminded me of people, of course.