The Cucumber Baby was Both Practical and Delicious

“Mumma, why don’t you take Pearl here out to the garden, see if you can’t load her up?”

I have gone to my parents’ place for the afternoon.  My father, having discovered that the inside of my windshield has the transparency of an executive board’s decision-making policy, potters off in search of Windex.

My mother grabs a knife.

The garden, a gated affair that succeeds in keeping the deer out and the veggies in, teems with ripe and ripening flora.  It is mid-September in Minnesota; and while Minneapolis itself remains green, two hours’ north the change of the seasons is in the air, the maple tree on their property beginning to turn.

Snow is not far in front of us.

We wander amid the rows, pulling up beets and onions.  The green beans hang in chandeliers, slim and tolerably fuzzy.  The tomatoes wink, in varied shades of green and red, from within their cages.

My mother is bent in half, her hands at work.  “How many cukes?” she calls.

“As many as you can spare,” I say.

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” she says, her voice muffled by the vegetation.  “I was just out here yesterday, and would you take a look at this one?”

She hoists a particularly ambitious cuke aloft, a green dirigible against the bright blue sky.

There is a hollyhock off to the side of the garden.  “You know,” I say, “it seems to me that I remember Grandma making me a little doll out of hollyhocks.  Does that seem right to you?”

My mother straightens up, smiles.  “Yes,” she says.  Her dark brown eyes shine.  “A little blossom skirt, a bit of green, and a little blossom bonnet.”

“I think that’s why I love hollyhocks.”

She looks down at the extra large cucumber in her hand.  “We used to make dolls of these, you know.”

I cock my head toward her, a quizzical gesture I know to be one of hers. 

“We drew little faces on them,” she says, wistfully.  “And wrapped them in little receiving blankets.”

I laugh.  “You played with cucumber babies?”

She nods. “Me and Sis and Patti and Janice, we all had our little cucumber babies.”

She grins.  “And then for supper, we peeled them and ate them with a little salt and pepper.”

 She tosses me the cuke. “Let’s go see what your father is up to, shall we?”