gone fishing

Love lettuce will be away from its desk for the next seven days. If you need immediate assistance, please press zero now.

hypothetically speaking

Let's just pretend you had a whole mess of corn sitting around the house, and you've eaten as much as you possibly can for dinner, and your freezer is already crammed with the stuff. Could you turn the rest into kitty litter? Dry it out and keep it in your trunk as a salt substitute for winter? What about fashioning a false tooth out of just the right kernel? It doesn't need to be a gigundous molar or anything, just, say, the size of a baby tooth.

hit and run

I am an indignant pedestrian. It's in my blood, really. The first time I was almost killed in New York city was when my aunt thumped on the hood of a cab that had nearly mowed us down. Even a cabbie--up for three days straight, though he hadn't seen the inside of a bathroom since last Tuesday, hopped up on caffeine and uppers--was no match for my aunt, a fierce knitter and pre-school teacher. She left him quivering with fear. (At least in my memory.)

With that ancestral history in mind, imagine me making my way to the Davis square T stop yesterday. I come to a notoriously bad intersection, as far as any pedestrian who hopes to see tomorrow is concerned. A side street empties out to a major road at exactly the spot where humans--unarmed with seat belts or airbags or fenders or usually even a horn--are expected to make their way across the major road. Motorists on the side street are trying to cut into traffic, never paying much mind to us bipeds.

So I step off the curb, waiting to make eye contact with a driver on the side street, who is clearly hoping to merge into traffic. Only she's looking over her shoulder, away from me. So I wait. She inches out, towards my toes. I wait. She inches. At a break in traffic, she starts rolling into the intersection, turning her head for the first time to see me. I'm prepared with my best stink eye, a wilting look that I reserve for idiot drivers. Think mean nun, disapproving mother, and cranky police officer before his morning coffee.

Then I realize that it's a friend! With a fuzzy Snoopy steering-wheel cover! And I've given her my stink eye! Though she's kind, points out that she did in fact see me, and pretends to not have noticed my glare. Oh, dear. I wear my tail between my legs for the rest of the day.

hillbilly in the city

The harvests are getting really heavy. 600 pounds of tomatoes. 700 ears of corn. 140 melons. Buckets of carrots weighing more than certain crewmembers. It's so heavy and cumbersome that we haul it all back to the barn in pickup trucks, instead of the garden carts we used for the early summer, leafy-green harvests. So sometimes, when you take said truck into a nearby tawny suburb for an ice-cream happy hour, and the driver of the truck notices a burning smell from the cab, you might check to make sure you aren't towing several stalks and at least a few ears of corn, wedged between the tail pipe and jammed in the grill.

You can take the hillbilly out of the farm, but you can't get the farm out of a F150's grill.

change of plans

I was supposed to have spent the weekend visiting with old college friends. Instead, one of them found himself on the losing end of a battle with a bee and spent the night in a Pittsburgh hospital. Everyone is fine now, but the plane went to Boston without them. So I was suddenly free to spend the night sleeping in a car on the south shore of Boston.

If we'd had a tent, one might have called it camping. But there was no tent. There was, however, a campfire. There were weenies and brats, smores and mosquitoes, lanterns and headlamps. It smelled and looked like camping. But me and my mummy bag tucked in for the night in the back of the Bismark--a sweet Mercedes wagon with leather and a sunroof. It was more like a night of upscale homelessess than camping. But for a weekend when nothing went as planned, it was pretty good.

i was blind but now i see

Too early for words this morning. Instead, feast your eyes on the quilts of Gees Bend. How come no one told me they could look like this? This information could have completely altered my quilting career.

who me? i didn't say a thing.

Last night, I repeated Burton's name until I'd annoyed him awake--Burton. Burton. Burton. Burton? Burton. Burton!--to tell him he was sleeping on the tomato plants. I know I've said crazy things in my sleep before. At times, I may have thought I was weeding carrots or harvesting chard from his ear or who knows what all. That was crazy talk. Anyone could see that. But this time--for real!--he was sleeping on the tomato plants.

By the time I managed to get my point across to an awake and understandably humorless Burton, I realized my problem. So I flopped over and pretended I was asleep.

have you finished your christmas shopping yet?

I have. Sorry to ruin the surprise, but you're all getting pickles this year. When you open your package and wonder where the rest of the present is, maybe you'll think back to this cool August day, when we finally got a break from the heat, and I spent the larger part of the day saving some of my summer for later in the year, when the days are shorter and the flavors less juicy. You'd probably rather get an iPod Micro or seasons one and two of Arrested Development on DVD--and I would, too, believe me. But we don't get to choose in my family. So pucker up and enjoy. Merry merry.

please stand by

We at love lettuce are experiencing technical difficulties. While the narcoleptic iBook pays a visit to the land of Brighton, Mass., please use the extra time in your days to do some actual work. Or perhaps write a letter to your state representative, high-school band teacher, or French foreign-exchange host family. Or maybe you could figure out what Bill Murray and Scarlette Johansson whisper to each other in the final scene of Lost in Translation. And if you haven't seen that film yet, get thee to the rental store post haste.

We'll be back as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

lessons learned

Among the many dangers on the farm--from scuffle hoes and harvest knives to paper wasps and squash disease--it's the quiet, steady threat of the sun that worries me the most. I wear a Texas-sized hat and go through sunscreen like a Hummer does gas, but even so, the C word is often on my mind. It didn't help my confidence when Morning Edition reported yesterday that skin cancers among young adults have tripled in the last ten years.

If I could, though, I might offer the following bit of advice: If, on your way home from work, you feel a suspicious lump on your rump, before turning around and driving straight to Mass General to have what must be a giant cancer removed, stop at home to make sure it isn't just a cherry tomato that found its way into your shorts.

something new for my resume

Today, I drove a tractor. Not one of them green and yellow numbers with air conditioning and turn signals, but a Farmall Cub with peeling red paint and a throaty purr that's pushing into its sixth decade.

I am in love.

on burlington

There are walls to sit on! Harbors! Smiley husbands! Mini vegetables! And sunsets set to Mozart!

I don't know, though. Could I be a Vermonter? Do I have it in me? I hear they sometimes get snow. Then again, they make a lot of cheese, too. I do like cheese.

and how much do the morals cost?

This weekend, in Burlington, Vt., with friends, we faced a moral dilemma. It boiled down to the telling of a white lie which, if successful, would have allowed us to collect on something for which we had legitimately paid. Without the lie, we would have been up poop creek without a picnic. I won't go into the details, but you'll have to take my word that there were no nefarious intentions.

In our conversation, one person said, "My mother always said that if you have to ask whether or not something is wrong, you probably already know the answer." This seems like good logic when applied to some situations: On the sidewalk in front of her house, you find your neighbor's two-caret engagement ring, which you know she recently lost. Should you return it? Not even a dilemma. Right? Come on, people.

But what if you buy a used car and, several months later, discover a bag with $5,000 cash tucked inside the wheel well. Do you return it to the previous owner? What if you bought it from a smarmy used-car dealership?

And finally, what if you find a plastic shopping bag stuffed with $5,000 cash on the sidewalk outside of a store in which you just saw a fabulous pair of shoes on sale in exactly your size, but you just spent your last penny on a donation to Greenpeace. The answer, I believe, is obvious. Right?

The picnic, by the way, was splendid. Definitely worth a touch of moral turpitude.

crotchucopia

Look. At. Those. Eggplants. I know--they're weird!

if only they could make big, fluffy socks out of this stuff

a first

Today, a 14-year-old boy asked if he could sniff my pickles.

I didn't know whether to slap him, kiss him, or call his mother. Then his brother explained that "he does this all the time." Turns out our favorite 14-year-old farm volunteer is a self-professed pickle sniffer. To the extent that, when he spotted the pickles in my sammage from the opposite side of the picnic table, he was unable to call off any little voices in his head that may have cautioned him otherwise, and hollered out, for everyone to hear, "Jen, can I sniff your pickles?"

I handed one over. And asked him to please keep it.

spotted recently on the farm

1. A snapping turtle's egg--abandoned, soft, and dented--at the edge of the farm that borders a swampy wetland, thanks to the resident beaver.

2. A bird's nest, with three blue eggs the size and color of Cadbury mini eggs, tucked inside a thick stand of Brandywine tomatoes. (Hands remained in pockets to resist the gravitational pull of Cadbury mini eggs to the mouth.)

3. The look of true panic upon the faces of at least two crew members, upon realizing that the calendar had rolled over to August, threatening to bring September, October, and--even worse--a job search even closer.

4. Ripe blackberries. Enough to stuff your face and still have plenty left over with which to make pies. I love pies.

5. Lobo, the regal, ancient farm dog, as patient and still as the lions at the New York Public Library, while he tolerated the attention of a pestering but well-intended little girl.

remembering

Lest anyone think I intend to cast my sister in a "negative light," I offer this fond memory.

When we were little, my sister and I were woefully deprived of toys. At some point, though, we managed to secure the rights to a paddle-ball game. It came, conveniently, in a belted fanny pack one could wear around one's waist, in case one wanted to look like a German tourist on holiday, ready for a paddle-ball tourney at a moment's notice.

Now, I don't remember us ever playing paddle ball, though we must have at least once. Instead, we stripped down to our socks and sneakers, strapped on the pouch, and streaked through the house, looking like a pair of naked German tourists who forgot to take their meds but remembered their sensible footwear.

Maybe that's why we didn't get more toys?