I was so proud of my garden this year. I had managed to grow eggplants, which I’ve never been able to do in the past.

This summer, I had at least 20 eggplants growing on two plants. They were small and didn’t seem to be getting any bigger so, a few days ago, I fed them plant food and waited.

Today, I went to check on them … and they were gone. One-hundred-percent missing. There wasn’t a trace of them. It was as if they had never existed.

Do eggplants regularly disappear? That would explain why I could never grow them. Maybe, in past years, they were there before I saw them and had vanished by the time I started looking for them.

Their giant leaves still exist, though. Only the eggplants are gone. We don’t have deer, just rabbits and squirrels. But even if they ate them, there’d be evidence, e.g., partly eaten eggplants lying all over the ground.

This is very perplexing. But, then again, so is my zucchini situation.

Everyone who grows zucchini says that they’re overwhelmed by the abundance of their harvest. I grew two zucchini. Two. I have several enormous plants that look very healthy but they don’t have any zucchini growing from them now that I picked the two that grew. I’m beginning to wonder if my zucchini disappeared, too.

My strawberries vanish regularly, but I blame that on birds. But I can’t blame birds for everything. Eggplants and zucchini wouldn’t fit in bird beaks, unless they were vulture beaks. I haven’t seen any vultures in my garden, though. If I did, I would have certainly taken a picture.

Speaking of pictures, I should have taken some of my eggplants—just to prove that they did exist and that I didn’t dream that I grew them.

The line between my real life and my dream life has been getting blurry lately.

Bye Bye

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(Note to Grammar Purists: The plural of eggplant can be eggplant or eggplants. I didn’t understand the rule regarding when to use the former and when to use the latter, so I chose to use “eggplants” at every mention. Zucchini is the plural of zucchini.)