Don’t even think about feeding me a beet. It’s not going to happen.
Tom Robbins is a favorite author of mine. Tom thought highly of beets. Let me just quote him for a moment:
The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…
So did my father, I think. Although I don’t remember ever seeing him eat a beet before that fateful summer. He may have initially planted them for my mother who liked pickled beets. Which are, arguably, the worst of all the beets.
Appalachia was in the greening. That time in early spring when the green leaves on the trees were so slight, so new, so small, that they were more of a green haze than a green bower.
The greening on this April day was superb. The sky was the blue of a robin’s eggs with air so clear and so clean it was like Thanksgiving crystal before the feast.
With the revival of the garden, the greening, came the realization that winter was over. Happiness flooded Charlotte’s heart. On her knees, she pulled weeds from around the irises, making room for the hollyhocks to begin their biannual ascent. “I am blissful,“ she said aloud. She grinned though there was no one in the garden to see her or hear her.
Daffodils make my heart sing each and every spring since I saw my first one — I would have been about 15. I hadn’t lived in places that had daffodils. It was love at first sight. I planted a hundred daffodil bulbs about 32 years ago. They multiplied and multiplied. I think it accurate to say that I have thousands now.
I ran across e.e. cummings’ poem some years after that. It too was love at first sight.
in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why, remember how
in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)
in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if, remember yes
in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)
and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me
W. Va. Fur and Root 