Fortuna Smiles
My tomato harvest of the summer is unprecedented. I’ve cultivated squash, cucumbers, eggplant and tomato plants at the back of the yard for years. That patch gets the most sun. I learn a bit with each season of experience. Working with living things is trial and error. There are a few things which I inexpertly control: site selection, weeding, and daily watering due to a dry spell. Oh, and I do visit the plants, walk the rows twice a day. I’ll never know if that helps at all. But I receive satisfaction from observing change of form and color from day to day growth.
Good, bad, or maybe unaccountably, a outstanding harvest, –is not up to me. That depends more on the shift in the giant weather patterns, the jet stream, that conveys moisture and heat. This is analogous in scale to acts of the gods, by comparison with my local attempts to nurture the productivity of the vegetables. Too much heat or not enough rain, a weather extreme, would portend a poor harvest.
Perhaps this is how our Roman ancestors felt, even more so, as they did not have the advantage of 
botany (hybrid plants) , labor saving tools, –all of the advantages that science affords to us. Even with these advantages my instinctive response to the bountiful harvest is an urge to give thanks to Nature.
Fortuna, Goddess of fertility, abundance, success was worshiped from remote antiquity by the Romans. In her one hand was a cornucopia of plenty, and in the other a rudder. The life of the individual as well as the course of the State was subject to her direction. The greatest of her temples Fortuna Primigenia, primordial Fortune was in Praeneste. She was also known as Fortuna Publica or Populi Romani, the patroness of the state. Fortuna Primigenia was the great mother goddess of the city.
Somehow I am comforted that the Romans knew that ultimate outcomes were outside of their purview. Living things — vegetables, a spouse, a son or daughter, co-workers, have lives of their own quite outside of the circle of my control. That is as it ever was.
