Dinner as an Exercise in Partnering

There is something inherently winsome about filling your dinner plate with food that you have grown.  And suddenly that is easier to do.  The lettuce has been looking for an appreciative audience for a couple of weeks now; the squashes and tomatoes are just beginning to offer themselves.  We snipped spinach and kale and chard last night for the first time, and plucked several peppers along with a single prickly cucumber.  All that, and it is clearly just getting started. It's as though the garden has taken a cue from the marketing slogan used by my beloved Blue Bell Ice Cream made at that "little creamery in Brenham, TX" -- "Eat all you want; we'll make more."  The miscellaneous bushes and vines are industriously making more.

It's time to dig the garlic.  The potatoes and carrots are well underway, and the okra is beginning to come on -- miniature spears, at this point, that in no time will be finger-long and aching for the skillet.  And the tomatoes are taunting -- heavy orbs sagging the branches, tenaciously green and aloof; indifferently, or perhaps defiantly waiting for their day.

But that day will come, and it will have been a partnership.  Nature will have done the lion's share, of course, but I have done my part -- seeding, warming, watering and lighting; transplanting and transplanting and tying and and protecting.  And watching.  Of that I have done more than my share.  Watching and waiting and tasting in my sleep.  Once upon a time, I have read, the seeds grew wild and free -- independent and reckless.  The fields were a salad bowl; the ditches were a tray; fence rows trellised whatever the birds had planted.  But with our domestication of the varieties has come a certain dependence.  They need us if they are to productively grow.  Which is only appropriate since is becoming more and more plain that we need them to productively thrive.

Clumsily, then, I'll do my part -- at least the parts I know to do while hopefully stumbling onto the rest of things I need to do.  I will feed them in the trust that they, in turn, will return the favor.  Thus far, I think, I am getting the better end of the deal.  I can't wait to see what will be ready for dinner tonight.