Rock farms and peanuts

This being Memorial Day weekend, it's time to put plants in the ground.

JC rented a tiller "up to the Ace," as they say in the South, and this afternoon he and I and Buttercup tilled our large vegetable garden plot. He did most of the tilling, although I did try my hand at a couple of rows. I think it helps if you're tall enough to hold the tiller without having your hands almost level with your chest. A good roto-tiller tends to get away from a short gal, especially once she starts enjoying the gasoline fumes swirling about her little head like visions of sugar plums.

Where were we?

Oh, yes. The garden.

The garden, she is very rocky. She is, in fact, more rock than garden from what I can tell. So once the soil was nice and loose, Buttercup and I took the wheelbarrow up and down the rows and tossed rocks into it. Big rocks, little rocks, little bits of coal that were dumped in one corner by the school teacher or schoolhouse custodian 150 years ago. Of course, there wasn't a garden here then. And the people who first cultivated a garden there could not have known that they were building right atop the school teacher's favorite coal-dumping spot.

We have potatoes that we're going to put in the ground tomorrow. And we have squash and brocolli and tomatoes, eggplant and bell peppers that we've started in flats and are hardening off by letting them spend some time on the porch every afternoon.

I love the garden. I wish I were better at it. I wish I had either knowledge or creative vision. Fortunately, my knowledge grows all the time, and we are blessed to have bought our house from people who had what the kids call "mad garden skillz."

So this year is amazing. This year, we get to discover all the flowers and foliage as they rise this spring. We haven't been here long enough to ruin anything. If my calculations are correct, next spring will fall somewhere between a letdown and an all-out indictment.

The thing I love most about gardening badly is the time it allows for fretting and rumination.

Today, for example, instead of clearing my mind and getting back to earthy basics, I worried about money and travel and the state of healthcare in America. I worried about Little Orphan Annie and the girl who didn't win American Idol.

Did I mention that I attended a small get-together last week that could aptly be called an "Idol Party?" It's true. I was a one-night member of the Soul Patrol.

We were at Buttercup's cousins' house for the show. At one point in the evening, B's cousin decided to change his pants in a very public fashion. Buttercup was rendered speechless by the sight of her male cousin, naked from the waist down, jogging around the living room. But where words failed her, laughter found her, and she was soon rolling on the floor in a fit of giggles. No, seriously, ROLLING on the floor with laughter.

Her cousin didn't care. He's very proud of his boyhood, and is famous for his outspokenness about it.

In the moment, we had a very matter-of-fact conversation about the whole thing.

Yes, that's different than what you have, isn't it? It's a penis. Yes, that's how boys pee. Etcetera, etcetera.

A couple days later, B was on her way to the bathroom and told me that she wished she had "what J--- has to go pee."

I told her I understood.

"That looks cool, huh?"

"Yes."

"But what girls have is at least as cool as a penis. Probably cooler."

"But I want to be a boy. Maybe when I get bigger I wil be a boy," she said, really dejected about the whole thing. Then she moped off to pee with her regular, boring, girly "befront," which is how we generically refer to all the business that isn't the behind. We use the real words, too, but there are just too many of them to be economical enough for a busy 3-year-old.

Not that it matters whether we use the real words, and thank goodness for that.

She's developed a serious case of penis envy, except that she thinks it's peanuts envy. Today at breakfast in the downtown diner where there are only about 6 tables and the quarters are so close that the cook has to feed you, B decided it was time to talk about how she wanted peanuts.

"You want peanuts? I don't think they have them. How about eggs and pancakes?"

"No," she said, unable to believe our stupidity. "PEANUTS, like on your BODY. Like J--- has."

Oh. A peanuts.

I was thinking about that while I was pulling rocks from the garden and tossing them into the wheelbarrow.

B was thinking about it, too. Wiggling her fingers in the dark, loose dirt, she said without looking up at me, "Mommm---"

You've heard it. "Mommmm---- can I get a phone in my room?" "Mommmm---- can I stay up until 11? "Mommm--- can I ask you for something we both know you'll never give me?"

"Mommmmm----" she said, "I really want a peanuts."

And in what may have been my greatest parenting moment of the month, I was able to restrain the impulse to tell her that it's a lot more fun to rent than to own, if you know what I'm saying, heh, heh. And ha!"

She what a good mom I am?

Comments

[peripateticpolarbear]

Very good mom. Be sure to remember that story, though....you know for her prom date to hear.