Farm Share

12/03/20 • 1 min

It is the season of bizarre vegetables. Being the thoughtful Vermonter that I am, I subscribe to a local farm share. Every two weeks I get a basket—actually it is a yellow plastic bag—filled with fresh produce. This is the time of year when my “Standard Family Share” gets weird. Red and yellow carrots, entire branches of Brussels sprouts, parsnips, and kohlrabi find their way into my kitchen. Who are these strangers?

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Embodied Imagination

I am Ashwagandha. “The smell of a horse” is my Sanskrit meaning. Though I am not a horse, my name conjures images of horses—manes whipping in the wind as they gallop along deserted beaches on the Arabian Sea or climb high plateaus in Nepal and Uzbekistan. Wild, ferocious, and free are the ways you describe me.

Under the right conditions, I can be obedient. For those who tame me, I calm nerves and slow racing hearts. I am the herbal supplement Indian ginseng; I am poison gooseberry, from the nightshade family.

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Small Victories

When we lived at Terry’s house—a small log cabin in East Charlotte at the end of a very long and sometimes treacherous dirt driveway, I counted getting all the way home a small victory. Let me clarify, sometimes that victory was actually quite large. I tended to drive low-to-the-ground fuel-efficient Honda Civic Hatchbacks back then. Though I often outfitted those Hondas with studded snow tires, the depth of the snow in the driveway sometimes prevented entrée. Terry plowed the driveway himself and on his own schedule, which wasn’t always mine. He had built the cabin himself from timbers he’d taken from the land with a team of horses he’d borrowed from a neighbor. He was an excellent, though sometimes taciturn housemate. His cabin was the perfect landing place for us when we packed up and left Emmett’s dad.

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