Confounding Strangers: the little joys of life

A lot of people ask me about my Vespa. I see a lot of looks of longing (because, HELLO!, it's totally flippin' fun to ride one and everyone can tell...) yet they often feel the need to explain to me how come they could never drive one. It almost always boils down to how many groceries they have to buy or the kinds of errands they have to run. I'm not going to argue that it would be challenging to shop for a large family and haul five kinds of mega-jumbo-supersized cereals along with five thousand juice boxes and all the other amazing things us people eat.

And yet...yet I always remember my good friend Sharon (who rode a scooter in Taiwan for several years) telling me about entire families piling onto one small scooter to get places in Taiwan. She would tell me that there really wasn't anything the Taiwanese weren't willing to strap artfully to their beat up scooters. Things like freezers and beds and five children all hanging on where ever they could. It makes me feel like we make a lot of excuses for ourselves and what we aren't capable of doing without Titanic sized vehicles.

This here picture is one example of the interesting things I can drag home from the garden center. I have practiced the art of strapping cargo to my scooter and know the joys of confounding strangers wherever I ride with the image of me surrounded by interesting bags and sticks, boxes of beer and the scooter trunk propped open by intriguing collections of bottles and loaves of bread. I remember people in the parking lot of the Santa Rosa Trader Joe's actually stopping to stare while I would pack my scooter full of five bulging bags of groceries.

I always kind of enjoyed giving them such a curious show.

These are Morello cherries, the classic "pie" cherry. (Some people might argue that Montmorency holds this title. They can argue, it's alright.) They look pretty normal sized in this picture but they aren't. They're tiny. Morellos are small anyway, these ones are almost all pit. They make a damn fine tart cherry sauce to pour over cocoa meringues. I'm not actually sure I'll have enough to do anything with them this year. These make me think of Pam Kitty Morning.*

That is the most lush lettuce I have ever grown. I'm thinning it like crazy but everywhere I have made space it is immediately filled by the growing heads. Oh my, it's so sweet and good.

Don't you kind of feel you could dive into that bed of greens and sleep like the dead? I can't stop looking at it. I'm hypnotized by it's green glow. As the weather warms I fear it's going to do a quick bolt for the sun. What an incredible waste that would be. Salad for lunch an dinner every day is called for.

Finally, look at this little Casserta Mexican zucchini. So tiny, so delicate and fuzzy. I haven't been able to spend much time in the garden this past week so the weeds are almost large enough to choke out a colony of people, yet everything is still thriving. I staked tomatoes, tomatillos, and watered everything. I'm not looking forward to the heat, but the dinners it grows are worth it.

*I'm so relieved I'm going to be in a book, because even though Pam pretends to love all her peeps equally, I'm convinced that she has a thing for her published friends. It was all for you my friend!!