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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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