The Horn of Plenty Busy Already

In one of my favorite hokey little towns in Iowa is a farm stand with a huge ten foot tall cornucopia out front. I don’t know that it’s always on display but the sheer size and slightly faded nature of it leads me to believe it’s a permanent installation. Besides, if I built a show-stopper like that I would leave it up forever and perhaps add night time spotlighting to extend my neighbors hours of viewing pleasrue. I drive by this wonder and I see my happy self in a garden. Engineer striped overalls and a worn straw hat (although I have waged a ceaseless quest to find any hat that doesn’t bind my head and make me look like a perverted trucker or gullible rube at a rodeo (but you have to remember this is an imaginary garden). Song birds riding on my shoulders like St Francis of Assisi, veggies rapidly greening and pumpkins inflating before my very eyes, master gardener of all I survey. Even in this rich fantasy a small bitter segment in the back of my minds asks…”What then.”

The “Then” is acres of rotting goods, frozen tomatoes turning transparent before dropping into puddles of ooze, pumpkins collapsing inwardly on themselves to hide their shame of harvestlessness and flat wilted greens so slick you could skate on them. It’s a sad image, I love fresh veggies. When the nectar and ambrosia blight hits, the gods will eat crisp salads as the only palatable alternative. I also know you are thinking ahead, silently pleading with me to save the carnage, harvest and preserve Mother Earth’s sweet gifts. Your cries will fall on deaf ears though. I won’t can. I’ll not even consider it for a minute. You can’t make me can!

The act of canning really sounds like the kind of thing I would enjoy. Clear shiny glass jars, a fresh coat of red or orange or green on a starched white apron. Amazing fruit smells drifting forth from the kitchen satiating the house in a cloud of welcoming lucious steam. Sweet and sticky jam coated pots to lick, crisp things to chop. Should be heaven, right? I think it all gets back to my childhood really (what’s that Dr. Freud lie back down on the couch?). Our entire back yard was a garden. Stinky compost, a natural (thumb and forefinger squish) pesticide program and a far-ahead-of-their-time approach to eliminating sugar from the family diet. Imagine a world of never sweet enough jelly, alum free gummy pickles rolled into a simple vegetarian diet. Like the cucumbers I was forced to tend, I am strong but I have a bitter core. I was often offered a glimpse of how things should be. Rare trips to Grandma’s (now that I have children of my own to complain to me about my shortcomings I realize we were probably there very often) crunchy pickles and sweet spoonfuls of jelly to be eaten by the bowl full. A basement full of cupboards and shelves bowing beneath the combined tonnage from years of preserved harvest from the most amazing little garden. Even that fine dose of Americana is tainted by my Grandfather, years after Grandma’s death fighting a race against the clock to consume blackening jellies, soft-spotted pickles and unidentifiable jarred masses, their ghosted labels unreadable. That we never found him dead under a pile of broken jars at the kitchen table surprises me even to this day. So I will happily pass by the golden field of America’s bread basket, past the pick-your-own stands and farmers markets, occasionally stopping in for fresh salad ingredients for that night’s supper. I will even continue my quaint daydreams of rolling fields and green thumbs before reality calls me back, standing a bare plot or dirt, unplanted crops, unloved soil, the only wildlife a few sharp crows pulling at my hair to get the last few strands of straw hat. Dazed and hungry, nothing but a bird beaten leather hatband welded to my head like a too tight sweatband, too faded to fight on. I hear that Green Giant guy wants a piece of me too.


~ Jeff