Fruits & Vegetables

Keep It Simple. Eat A Banana.

/ Ally Bean / 12 Comments

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~ • ~

I awakened this morning with a charley horse in my right calf.  Not the smoothest way to start the day.  But one that got me thinking about a woman who I used to know who had some fascinating ideas about the nature of reality.

~ • ~

This woman who I’ll call K, was one of the nicest, calmest, most supportive human beings I’ve ever met.  She was a mother of 4, wife of a physician, lived in a charming older home that she filled with pets, overstuffed furniture & amazing meals.

K, who was born in the late 1940s and influenced by the 1960s hippie movement, was a nurturing person who grooved on Dr. Wayne Dyer and healing crystals.  And it was from this perspective that she viewed reality.

For instance, one of K’s beliefs was that when a person awoke with a pain in his or her body, the pain was a result of the sleeper’s body being used by some celestial force in a different plane of existence during the night.  This made sense to her and she shared this idea with anyone who’d listen to her.

~ • ~

Now I cannot conclusively say that K’s idea is totally wrong.  Who knows, eh?  But I can tell you, my gentle readers, that my father was a small town doctor who had slightly different take on charley horses in the middle of the night.

His simple, straight-to-the-point explanation of why a person had a charley horse was that said person wasn’t eating enough magnesium potassium.  And to remedy this situation he’d just say: “Eat a banana.“

~ • ~

And so it is as I sit here this morning typing this story that I find myself eating a banana– and reflecting upon the wonderful people who I’ve known in my life.  Some a little more based in my idea of reality, than others.

The Tale Of The Lonely Beet

/ Ally Bean / 22 Comments

DSCN3608Once upon a time the Lady of the House went to the grocery where she purchased some beets.  She was going to roast them and serve them as a side dish with some ham for dinner.

:: The Lady of the House had good intentions.

However, when the Lady of the House came home from the grocery, she put the beets in a stainless steel bowl which she put in the frig.  Then, she forgot about their existence.

Because the beets were well-mannered, they did not call attention to themselves in the frig.  No, they just sat in the bowl and slowly allowed mold to cover them.  Perhaps they were cold and considered the mold to be like a sweater.  Perhaps they were content and enjoyed connecting with the mold.

:: We will never know for sure.

All we know is that the next time the Lady of the House looked at the beets she saw six moldy, dried out vegetables that were way past their prime.  Upon seeing what had happened, the Lady of the House said a few words that will not be repeated on these pages.

But the Lady of the House had another idea for the beets.  You see, the Lady of the House’s mother had a saying which she said to the Lady of the House when the Lady of the House was a girl.

:: And this saying was: waste not, want not.

Remembering what her mother had told her to do, the Lady of the House decided to toss the beets into the wooded ravine behind her house.  The Lady of the House thought that some of the deer or raccoons that live back there might like to feast on said beets.

:: However, she was wrong about this assumption.

A few days later when the Lady of the House chanced to look outside upon her backyard realm, she noticed that all the beets were still there.  And that one beet in particular, that had the misfortune of landing on top of a concrete wall instead of on the ground, was positioned in such a way as to create a perfect photo-op.

So, the Lady of the House, who also happened to be a blogger extraordinaire, grabbed her camera.  Then she went outside and took one of the best artsy-farsty photos she has ever taken.  Not wanting to let this photo go to waste, the Lady of the House figured she could put this photo on her blog, tell her readers how this beet came to be so alone, and call it a blog post.

:: And that is exactly what she did.  The end.

Looking For Apples. Finding Pumpkins.

/ Ally Bean / 18 Comments

I wanted some local apples.  Considering that this is the part of the country where Johnny Appleseed did his thing you’d think that finding some local apples would be EZPZ.  But you’d be wrong.

There really aren’t very many local orchards any more, so it takes some driving way out into the countryside to find one.  Which is exactly what we did on Sunday.

However, once we got to the apple orchard we discovered that pumpkins were the raison d’être for this orchard’s existence.

It was the pumpkins’ orange-y cuteness that drew the customers into the barn market & adjoining fields.

First, a first sign told us what to do.

Nearby piles of [pre-picked] pumpkins showed us what we could expect to find if we chose to pick pumpkins.

Then, a second sign, explained to us what not to do.  I’m sure that Ralph Waldo Emerson upon seeing such a sign would scoff.  As you may remember, Mr. Emerson said: “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”  But apparently the management at this particular apple orchard had other ideas.  [Please note: no velvet cushions were provided in lieu of pumpkins.]

Entertaining as it might have been, we decided not to pick pumpkins.  Instead, we went into the barn market and bought a bag of apples, a jar of zucchini relish & a jar of quince jelly.  Then we returned home to enjoy our local apples purchased from one of the last apple orchards in the area.  Yum.

This Is What Passes For Excitement Around Here

/ Ally Bean / 8 Comments
Botanically, a tomato is a fruit. However, in ...

Image via Wikipedia

[Subtitled:  Somewhat Organized Thoughts Upon The Occasion of A Hopefully Random Act of Very Minor Violence]

Our mailbox is a rectangular, black metal one that sits on top of a white wooden post by the street.  It was tomato-ed. This is a first for us.

In the past our mailbox has been: smashed with a baseball bat;  peanutbutter-ed;  egged;  toilet paper-ed;  and robbed.  [One summer I decided to put a small bracket on the back of the white post and hang a basket of geraniums from it.  Very pretty… for the few days that it was there before someone stole it.]  But we’ve never had a tomato thrown at it.

The attack of this not-so-rotten tomato occurred between 6:30 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. while I drove Z-D to work.  Our mailbox, which is large, shiny and very noticeable when pulling out of our driveway, was just fine when we left home.  But when I got back home, the door to it was hanging open and there was a small dent in the side of it.  This I saw from the driveway as I pulled in.

It wasn’t until I walked down our driveway to see up-close what had happened that I realized that we had been tomato-ed with a large, firm, red tomato that left its seedy drool all over one side of our mailbox– and its gushy guts in the grass around the bottom of the wooden post.

As I didn’t grow up in suburbia I can only guess at the motivations for tomato-ing someone’s mailbox.  Questions plague me.

  • Which came first: the tomato or the mailbox?
  • Was this planned?  And if so, where did the perp get his or her tomato?  Stolen from someone’s garden?  Purloined from Mom’s frig?  Purchased at Kroger?
  • Is it possible that our mailbox wasn’t the intended target? 

Considering there are high school kids in the two house across the street from us & in one house next door to us, I have to wonder if this is a case of mistaken tomato-ing.

Answers to these questions elude me, leaving me to suspect that the real reason our mailbox was tomato-ed has nothing to do with logic.  I imagine, that like many things in life, the real reason that our mailbox was tomato-ed is that it was in the right place at the wrong time.