Surely a Trademark in There Somewhere

When word first began to get around that I was making this surprising vocational shift, questions abounded.  Most often they were whispered to Lori or one of my kids; occasionally they made their way directly to me.  "What is the plan?  Are you hoping to make a living doing this?"  Christopher responded to one such questioner that, knowing his Dad, he wouldn't be surprised if I were to do anything from giving away anything that might grow, all the way to trademarking a particular tomato.  When he shared his answer with me, I nodded approvingly but quickly made an editorial correction.  "I love tomatoes," I agreed, "but I think there is more market room with rutabagas.  I think I'll develop and trademark my own variety of rutabaga."

Now, the truth is I'm not sure I would know a rutabaga if it fell out of tree and hit me on the head -- no small deed, given the fact that rutabagas are roots -- but I intend to change all that.  No, I don't really have in mind my own trademarked varietal, but root vegetables seem, well, at the "root" of what I am hoping to accomplish.  How much fun, then, to open my poem-of-the-day from Garrison Keillor and read about this oft-maligned and usually forgotten earth-bound varietal -- the closing lines of which wax eloquent about...

...their dug-up texture,
the hint of dirt
that couldn't be baked away,
how they left the tongue
with a rumor of something
underground and dark.

And then this final, evocative description:  of this, the almost quintessential autumn vegetable, "so reluctant to have left the ground."
"Rutabagas: A Love Poem" by James Silas Rogers, from Sundogs. © Parallel Press, 2006

Now that sounds like something worth specializing in!