From Jones Upon a Time

He never fully understood how bamboo could resemble a paper clip or why anyone would want that. Now they just held up the ragged remnants of last year’s tomato vines. The vines, once so rich and promising, now looked frail, thin, twisted and unstable. They were the garden’s pathetic, washed-up rock stars.

It was hard to imagine the garden once bore lush tomatoes, seething habaneros, though it was his wife who anthropomorphized the garden. She didn’t talk to it, exactly. But she regularly chided the carrots for being underachievers; she called the cucumbers assholes.

She accused the sunflowers of arrogance. They couldn’t help that they were tall and dominating. In late summer they were, anyway. Now they stood stoop-shouldered with snow crowning their oddly shrunken heads.