a plentiful harvest

 

 

we wanted to leave the vegetables as long as we could. tucked sweetly in the shades of the giant squash leaves, and the cucumber trellises that sprawl across the lawn. but at the urging of our grandparents, who told us they would get pithy and hard to eat if we let them grow past their capacity, we went back to the garden this weekend, our shoes wet with june twilight, and snipped off the first harvest.

we're saving a majority of the bounty to grill this weekend. with a little olive oil and some flank steak. but as soon as we got into the kitchen, we couldn't resist the urge to peel and cut in half one of the cucumbers and devour it over the sink. i'll always remember that night. weighing them on my grandpa's old scale and arranging them in pretty piles on the counter.

for some reason, i thought the cucumber would taste weird. like socks. or cardboard. i just couldn't, for the life of me, believe we could create real food. but as the sweet water ran down our chins, and the tiny room filled with the scent (and i immediately recalled my middle school obsession with bath and body works' cucmber melon shower gel), i realized we did it. from dirt and mulch and a few tiny seedlings came up from the earth true-to-life produce. oh, summer of 2012. you have redeemed yourself. and proven yourself a flightly little thing.