Prompted by reading my extended kvetch last week about rabbits eating my pea vines, lettuce, cabbages, brussels sprouts, and broccoli, my old friend Tom sent me the following message:

“Colin Thubron, in his little book on Cyprus (pre-invasion), writes about walking into a village that was said to be where broccoli came from. But he saw none growing. So he approached a little old [Greek Cypriot] lady and asked her where the broccoli was. She replied that the Turks had killed them all. He then explained that it was a vegetable he was inquiring about, and not a family. She nodded knowingly and told him that the Turks had eaten it all.”

Tom’s anecdote cracked me up, and not just because, like much of the best humor, it touches sensitive nerves about human prejudices and the ways we cover them up, or double down on them. I took it also as a gentle jab at my ascribing blame so universally for all my garden’s woes to one malevolent force, the rabbits.

The Greeks and Turks in Cyprus had ready villains to blame for everything that went wrong — each other. Why were things going haywire in Weimar Germany? Most Germans blamed the Jews. It is a natural human inclination to avoid blame for one’s own failings and to shift responsibility elsewhere. As my friend George often reminds me, if I break a glass I invariably report the event as “The glass broke.” I never say I dropped it. By using that passive voice I leave open the possibility in the listener’s minds that it wasn’t my fault, it just kind of jumped off the counter.

So much as I’d like to blame the rabbits, I think it’s probably time for me to take some responsibility. When growing things, you have to be prepared, you have to protect what you grow, you have to constantly monitor conditions and respond to situations as they arise. And I have to acknowledge that I haven’t always kept up in that regard.

Take my peach trees. The oldest and largest of them was so laden with fruit that about three weeks ago one of the biggest branches cracked right off, taking about a quarter of the tree (and the fruit) with it. I knew I should be thinning the fruit, but in my mind that failure to do so would simply result in smaller fruit, not to a disastrous branch crash. I would like to think I would have done better as a director of the condominium building that collapsed in Surfside, Florida, than those who occupied those offices, but I’m not so sure. You almost never envision the worst consequences of ignoring a problem.

Indeed, even after being alerted to the overladen peach issue, I would not give my response particularly high marks. I took to fairly aggressive thinning of the fruit on the remainder of the tree whenever I walked past it. I would select and pull off 10 or 12 peaches that were rubbing against other peaches, or had imperfections, or were placed where they wouldn’t ripen as well, and carried them to my bucket of pig slop, and fed them to the pigs.

But the emphasis is on “whenever I walked past it”. I did not put aside a couple of hours to focus on thinning the fruit. My efforts worked well on the branches closest to my daily chore route, but other branches around the back did not get that attention, and lo and behold, at the end of our several inches of rain this week yet another branch, with another quarter of the tree, cracked and crashed down.

“Blame thyself” may be a dangerous road to travel but perhaps the world would be a better place if we all took a detour down it now and again. This has occurred to me lately as I have found myself increasingly angered by our sliding back into an apparent fourth wave of the COVID pandemic — one that we, through vaccination, could avoid in a way that most of the world cannot.

It angers me when I read, as I have in the last week, that there has been a 54% uptick in COVID cases in the U.S. in the past two weeks. It angers me that Columbia County, more th