It Came From Out Of The Ground!

We grow the same vegetables every year. Sugar snap peas. Asparagus. Peppers and basil. And of course tomatoes. They even ripen now, and not just at two minutes before frost, because of the global warming. You have to grow your own tomatoes. Eating tomatoes from the store, even in the summer, is like going on a hot date with someone's avatar.

But for much of my life I didn't care much about vegetables. I assumed they were just on the plate to chaperone the meat. Salads were pointless. Something to soldier through.

When my Dad retired, he started making space for vegetables in the flower gardens. I have photos of him looking mighty pleased with his harvest, and he wasn't a smiley sort. I understood in theory, but put it down to one more odd thing only old people get excited about, like compression socks and lemon drops. My sister's been like this all along but she sort of started out old.

But something happened to me in the last few years. I like vegetables now. And salads. What the hell. Last year we stuck in some lettuce plants and it blew my mind how I could trot out the kitchen door and snap up a bunch of greens just like that. This year I thought maybe we could do some advanced college-level vegetables. Broccoli. Cauliflower. Brussels sprouts.

I didn't have a lot of hope for them, though. Seems to me we tried some Brassicas the first year we got this house, and they turned into an aphid maternity ward. I'm not even sure we ate any. And, after all, they were only vegetables. If Brussels sprouts made meatballs I might have been more concerned.

My plants jumped up quickly and I maybe checked them once or twice but basically I was waiting for them to fuzz over with aphids, at which point I would conclude they were about ready. So imagine my surprise when I peered into the top of one of my plants and found a broccoli bigger than my head! And another! And another! I didn't know what to do. Here I had a shit-ton of gorgeous broccoli all ready at once and no idea, other than sharing with neighbors, what to do with it. Until it occurred to me that you could put more than gin in a freezer. Enter Google and a plan began to emerge.

Well I couldn't be more pleased with myself. I now have six bags of blanched broccoli in the freezer and more fresh in the fridge. Why, I'm just like Grandma! Things have been Put By! In fact I'm exactly like Grandma, assuming she didn't also have to slop the hogs and milk the cows and feed the menfolks and strangle a chicken and hie off to the windbreak in the snow to go potty. All right. Comparing myself to Grandma is like getting into college as a Legacy. It's cheap ancestral credit.

The Googles said to soak the broccoli in salt water for a while to discipline any resident insects. But I didn't have any insects. Oh wait! Oh there they are. Hmm. Tucked way up in there, huh? Lookit that. They look right cozy. Hmm. Well, it's not like I didn't go ahead and bake a bunch of blackberry maggot pies that one year. The Googles say it's just extra protein and nobody will be the worse for it, and everybody did eat the pie, except myself, because I felt an allergy to larvae coming on, which is, I tell you, a thing.

Grandpa and Grandma

Blanching is a silly word for something that turns purple asparagus green or green broccoli greener, but we're stuck with it, and I did it. And I did pose with my broccoli haul, and I will be damned if I didn't feel mighty pleased with myself. Just like Dad.

Of course, I am old.


But not THIS old. Hey! Monday was Dad's birthday. Happy 111th, Daddy!

Checking In With Grandma

I picked up some spectacles the other day. Kaiser mentioned I had $150 credit towards a new pair of glasses, so I thought I'd get some, and maybe have enough cash left over to get me some sort of random Procedure. I haven't bought glasses for a while. $150 doesn't even get halfway around your face.

I've worn contact lenses since I was a teenager. In the sixties, getting used to contacts was an ordeal of the first order. They were thick and rigid and putting them in was like dipping little hubcaps in hot sauce and stabbing them onto your eyeballs. An hour is about all you could stand of that, and you were expected to bump that up by fifteen-minute increments every day until you either went blind or nuts or got used to them. It was painful, but pain was no match for teenage vanity. The first time one of the hubcaps slid off my cornea and began to travel across my eye, I flew into a panic. Would it go all the way around and slice off the string that held my eyeball in? Ultimately, I got used to them, although if an eyelash wedged in underneath it could cause me to fall off the sidewalk, weeping.

Over the years the product became lighter and thinner and gas-permeable and altogether more bearable. I never went over to the soft variety. One day at a softball game, a towering fly came to me in right field. I yelled "I got it I got it I got it" and deftly snagged the ball with my eye socket. That got the runner to third and me to the emergency room, where the immediate task was retrieving my contact lens before my eye swelled shut so tight they'd have to send in a team of spelunkers. Do you know that the average emergency medical cabinet contains tiny little toilet plungers for just that purpose? The doctor pries your lids open and takes the little plunger and goes doink and there's your lens.

So there have always been difficulties with the contacts, but it's a pretty good system overall. After you turn forty, something needs to be done about the close-in vision, so instead of bifocals, they give you one lens for distance vision and one for reading. Your eyes and brain duke it out and finally work something out amongst themselves. But then after another fifteen years or so, you discover you're kind of an old lady and things dry up, including your eyeballs. Now the contacts are starting to get a little cranky. It's nothing like the hubcap debacle, but towards the end of the day they begin to feel a little like Ritz Bits, salty side down. This is when I decided it might be prudent to get a spare set of $150 glasses, maybe just for the evenings, and three hundred additional bucks later, I have some. They're tiny and light, with progressive trifocals, and they work amazingly well. I can see everything very clearly as long as I'm peering out of the correct part of the glasses, and soon I hope to have mapped out which parts work where. I haven't put my contacts back in, to my surprise, and may have just become a four-eyes again, after forty years.

It's not that I don't think I look dorky, but maybe I just don't care as much. I did take a quick glance in the mirror. That's where Grandma lives. I don't check in with her often, but maybe I'll start. She was a sweet-faced old lady.