The Lure of Forbidden Peas

It took me ten minutes to walk from one end of our vegetable garden to the other. It is not a large garden--thirty of forty feet long--but the peas are ripe.

Last fall, I very carefully chose the seeds and plants for the garden by what was available. "O.K.!", I said. "I will take that." Peas were available.

I refused to thin the carrots or the onions, because I had grown up thinning carrots and onions in our grandparents' garden. (If you don't thin the mindlessly ambitious young plants, they will not all have room to grow. "Tough!", I thought. "Let them grow up skinny.")

The radishes--tough-minded critters--have grown past ripe. They are going to seed, so I tossed some of the most ambitious of them over the fence. But then the peas caught my eye. I shelled a few into my hand, and ate the peas. "Oh, my!" I grew up hating to shell peas so that Mom could can them, so eating fresh peas was always counter-productive, unless you have ever eaten canned peas, in which case you will know it is a mercy to eat them fresh, in spite of what your mother wants.

I expect to be green all day today, because no one is going to can the peas in our garden, anyway. I am grinning peas, belching peas, and am dangerously close to developing a cud of peas.

The javelinas can have the radishes if they wish, and if they don't, I will think of them as soil nutrients. But I am going to eat the peas, standing up, in the garden, while I think of our grandparents.

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