Seed-Savers

Did you know that it's a sin to eat store-bought jam? That, and downright un-American. There's victory in the garden, you know-- in the raspberry patch, and on the labels of the gold-lidded glass jars in the cupboard. If you lie to me, and take the summer-fruit's name in vain, and offer me "Smucker's" one day for my english muffin, don't expect to get away with it. Not without a proper talking-to, anyhow. Did you know I could tell a ripe berry at two years old? What do you mean? Of course I'm not exaggerating! I was practically raised in a raspberry patch! Practically born in the brambles! There were heirloom patches on both sides of the family! Once, we found a kitten in Great-Grandpa Daniels's raspberry bushes and took her home, and fattened her up, and we might have named her "Raspberry", too, if we were the sort of family that did things like that.

Did you know that it's a sin to plant Bradford pears? That, and downright un-American. If I catch you cultivating a cultivar that's invasive to the Mid-Atlantic, I'm afraid there's going to be trouble. My mother is a Master Gardener, you know. Did you know that she thought it would be an nice outing for us to go pull garlic mustard from Whipp's Cemetery when Grandma Lu came to visit us in Maryland one spring? You'd better hope nobody planted a Bradford pear over my favorite little plot in the back with the twisted gate, because next ice storm that hits, you can be sure those limbs will crack. They'll drop like tiny twigs, and those beautiful old stones and I will just be crushed.

Did you know that it's a sin to buy a pound of ripe figs and let them go to waste? That, and downright un-American. They're the favored fruit of still-life painters, if we forget about pomegranates for a minute, and that's got to count for something. What? You can't eat them just because we're out of chèvre? You can't pretend you plucked it from the tree? What do you mean, am I going to roast some potatoes to have with the steaks tonight? Of course I'm not! What do you need potatoes for? You're going to eat figs with your steaks tonight! You're going to like it! What? You don't like it? In Florida when I was small, we'd go to Winn-Dixie to pick out treats, because it was vacation, and somebody would pick out frosted pop-tarts, and somebody would pick out fruit-snacks, and my father would pick out "Fig Newtons" every time. Now, I don't know why we picked up all this beautiful fruit if nobody is going to finish it. "This isn't how we eat them in Kuwait" my father says. "But, I guess a fig is a fig."