'Green Acres' is for someone else
I like vegetables. Especially the ones that don't taste like beets. I like things that grow into the ground, things that grow out of the ground, and things baseball-like I can chuck at the neighbor's dog when he's trying to do his business in our yard.
But I don't like gardens. In the winter, it's harmless fun to fantasize about the great piles of tomatoes, carrots and lima beans you'll harvest from a small plot in your yard sometime in July _ but not at my house.
"We could grow (insert name of vegetable) next summer," my wife said. "We could have a garden."
I stopped what I was doing, and by that I mean breathing and most probably any higher brain function.
The garden. The lack of trust in my wife's entire belief system started with our garden. I say "garden," but I also call Spaghetti-Os Italian. If Adam and Eve had been in this garden, they would have worked harder to get kicked out.
"Eve," the word came as a hiss from the serpent's mouth. "Did God say, 'you shall not eat from any tree in the gard ...'"
"You talk too much," Eve said, crushing out her cigarette on a mongoose. "Let's make out."
I also said "our." My wife wanted the garden, not me. I had as much interest in a garden as I did sow belly futures, Britney Spears' parenting skills, or math. So I used a tiller to rip through a section of our nice yard that hadn't hurt anyone, and made the ground ready for planting. Then I was finished with it.
My wife planted corn, carrots, peppers, strawberries and I think a few magic beans. Then she killed everything _ with a vengeance.
(Cue early '80s heavy metal band. Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh.)
Enter the Gardinator, wearing jean shorts and sun block. Well, she would have, if she'd remembered we had a garden. Which she didn't.
"Honey, you remember our garden? The spot in our yard that always looked like it needed mowed ... with a tractor?"
"We had dinner from our garden," she said a little too defensively for me to sleep lightly for a while.
Dinner? I thought. Sure, if I were on the Gun to My Head Diet.
"There were three ears of corn and four carrots," I said. "That was it. That was our garden."
She crossed her arms.
"Did we or did we not eat a meal from our garden?"
Well, she had me. Yes, we did eat a meal from our garden. This is what the political pundits call "spin."
"Sure, honey," I said in roughly the same way cops try to talk a jumper off a ledge. "We had a meal from our garden."
Politicians see a banner tax year and call it a budget surplus. Fanatics piece together unrelated passages in the Bible and call it God's will. Husbands wipe a wet paper towel across the counter and say we cleaned the kitchen.
Fine. We had dinner from her garden. I'll just have to make sure that doesn't happen again.
