Stop and smell the basil

Vegetables make me happy.

Wandering by stands piled high with asparagus and green pea pods, colorful nasturtiums mixed with spicy arugula, delicate pea shoots purple and white.

Mottled pears and deep scarlet cherries representing the less prominent (hanging) fruit component of the Union Square farmers market. Fruit makes me smile, but it doesn't touch the same ecstatic nerve as their earthbound siblings. There is just something about planting a tiny seed in the earth every spring, covering it with springy brown soil flecked with twigs and ragged egg shards, an occasional unearthed powdery shell from the sea reminding me of our underwater past. Water the plainly adorned with Popsicle sticks rows of potential, scare off the birds, the beasts, the slugs (or squish them between your fingers. Very un-Buddhist, but very effective). Space them, watch them, weed them as they grow into recognizable patterned sprouts, then stalks and leaves, then oh my god they're beautiful (and edible!) real plants!

Tomatoes and pumpkins don't count in my pro-veggie favoritism. I love them both dearly, maybe the most I must say as long as we're being honest. It's the tree fruit that don't quite seem as miraculous in my estimation. I mean, you plant a tree and the fruit appears year after year, which, granted, is miraculous in its own right, but somehow I find the lack of challenge a letdown. I have to admit that I haven't grown much fruit and don't know much about pruning, and I have tasted some bitter, wormy apples in my lifetime, so I know I am not giving fruit growers/lovers enough credit, but I can't help my lack of enthusiasm for the act of growing the pears and apples and berries that I adore eating.
But back to the vegetables...

Wandering through the farmers market reminds me of my fingers in the soil, my toes brown with sun and dirt, the hours slipping by as I pop fresh peas into my mouth and pat marigolds into place along the grassy perimeter of my garden. I am reminded of hot August afternoons and standing with waterhose in hand, spraying down my leafy brood, cup of steaming coffee in hand on cool September mornings. When I would return to the kitchen with a basket full of varying shades of greens and reds, oranges and purples, smiling at the vegetables still speckled with dirt while figuring out their appropriate for that evening eventual demise and digestion.

This year, gardenless and yearning for chlorophyll, I pick through basil leaves and delicate rabe, radish tops and crinkly kale. I won't bring any home to the boat today as the galley is not my own, but I will breathe in deep the smell of the earth, the smell of sun and sweat and generations of turning soil, the smell of my own future contentedness.