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Saturday, October 14, 2017

The Blues

One of the Blues.

I've got them. The blues, that is. Mostly in the veggie garden, but still, there are a lot of 'em. Not the old 12-bar variety, mind you, no grizzled harmonicists lurking in the carrots with broken hearts, no bottleneck slide guitarists drowning their sorrows in bourbon and Brussels sprouts, but still, I've got the blues.

I've got the All-of-my-fall-and-winter-veggies-seem-to-have-'blue'-in-their-names blues.

My story is relatively free of traditional blues themes such as infidelity, cheatin', workin' all day, cuckoldin', workin' all night, and whiskey (hey, I said relatively free of these themes). In their place, you'll find my blue refrain cropping up on a theme of brassicas. 'Blue Wind' broccoli, 'Dazzling Blue' Kale—hang on, should I go get my guitar? I think it'd really add something. No? No one wants me to go get my guitar? Yeah, I'm going to get it anyway.

...

Okay, where was I? Bluuuuue Wind broccol—wait, hang on, I gotta tune this thing.

Shoot, you know what, it's actually missing a string. Okay, forget the guitar. It's mostly lost in translation anyway. Rest assured, I was about to really cut loose on that thing.

So yeah, the broccoli, the kale, I've also got 'Blue Max' collard greens (or should I call them "collard blues"? No, no I shouldn't, that's just confusing), and I can't recall for certain, but I think the leeks I planted are actually 'Blue Solaise'. I've also got 'Roodnerf' Brussels Sprouts; I would not at all be surprised to find 'Roodnerf' translates as 'Also Blue' in whatever country it originated. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about all the blues. In the great tradition on of accidental color palettes emerging from the garden mine is doubtless one of the more agreeable and benign. I just wonder if all that blue will start to weigh on me over the course of a long Fall and Winter. Oh well, if it comes to it, I can always buy some new guitar strings. Or a harmonica. Or some whiskey ...

Monday, October 2, 2017

B'apples


First of all, let's make one thing very clear: the only reason these apples don't all have bite marks in them is because I picked them while my children were napping. At any other time, my son, whose first repeated word was "apple" (or, more accurately, "b'apple") and my daughter, who seems to have a sixth sense for when I might be out picking something in the garden without her, would immediately have taken two or three bites out of each specimen, then either set it down to be forgotten or actively cast it aside as no longer novel enough to warrant attention. Each fruit would then later be rediscovered by yours truly, in an oxidized-brown, dirt-covered, fruit-fly-swarmed state, hopefully just on the ground in the garden somewhere and not, as more often happens, returned to the hands of my son, the apple zombie, who since learning to walk in a beginner's gait resembles nothing else so strongly as he shuffles around gnawing an old corpse of an apple and muttering "b'apple ... b'apple ..." under his breath. 

So it is only during these few moments while both are sleeping that I am free to entertain the silly, passing flights of fancy I would normally swat like mosquitoes. Fantasies like: I'm a successful orchardist, calmly searching his trees for potential prize-winning fruits for the State Fair; or, I'm a visionary plant breeder who has just successfully cross bred apples with pumpkins, creating a massively profitable quintessence of Fall; or, I'm a normal person who can go pick an apple and eat it without feeling the need to write about the experience. Ridiculous stuff like that. You can see why I'm normally grateful for the distraction my children provide. 

Speaking of which, the zombie stirs. I better go hide these beauties and then forget about them like everything else I try to keep away from the kids.