Fear and Cucumbers

Welllllll the 4th of July Festival at Luckenbach was a great success!!  It was a beautiful day...full of love and music.  With your help, we even raised over $7,0000.00 for The Austin Harmony Project!  

Also, I made it through the day without one person asking me about the Corona bikini.   That too was a great success.  One of my friends said that I should have put it in the raffle.  Next year will be our 10th Live Free & Fly Festival (4th of July at Luckenbach).  If it is still in my drawer with the tags on (like they have been for the last 9 years..yes, 9)...I will put it in the raffle.  Or burn it like an offering to the one day I had the body to wear it.  I'm not kidding.  1 Day.  I was just recovering from a nasty flu and lost a bunch of weight.  I felt like shit, but I didn't have a stomach hanging over my pants.  That was my 1 day window.  Pretty sexy.

Let's move on.

Some of you lovely people have been asking me when the big dinner is.  You know, the one I was going to prepare after the huge vegetable harvest from our raised garden bed.  Well I am here to tell you that our garden was/is a wild success!!   So far we have not received a note from the HOA.  We have had a beautiful bounty of yellow tomatoes.  The red ones are usually pecked through before I get to them in the morning.  There is a mama mockingbird that sits and waits for the sun to come up and then swoops down and takes a big, juicy bite out of the perfect Roma tomato.  We had baskets of beans.  Plenty of peas and even a few cantaloupe.  Peppers too!  It has been great fun watching people walk their dogs and stop and stare at the garden.  I know for some of my friends and relatives in the Midwest, this is kind of silly.  We had  great gardens growing up in Wisconsin.  Perfect tomatoes and corn.  Here it's just too dang hot and the soil is not rich.  We have to create an environment where the seeds/plants will actually grow.  This leads me to our freakishly large cucumber invasion story.   They were so very huge, they were embarrassing.  I dreamed that I would give baskets of fresh vegies away to our friends and neighbors.  I dreamed of putting out a little table with a "Free" sign, inviting our fellow suburbanites to take some vegetables home to their families.  I thought this would be a way to introduce front yard gardens to our neighborhood and perhaps others would follow suit.  Then that day would appear.  The day we all celebrated our harvest with a party next to the little park in the neighborhood.  Everyone would share...remember?  There was supposed to be a big dance and harvest party by now.  But we had these alien cucumbers that started to take over our yard.

One day I was checking in on the garden and pulled back a vine.  I screamed.  I thought it was a pod from The Invasion of the  Body Snatchers movie, from 1978.  Then I pulled back another vine, then another.  These cucumbers were multiplying and stealing sheep from distant counties.   I picked it and ran inside.  For fear of being watched.   One has to be careful of how one holds the giant cucumbers.  It isn't flattering.  It isn't bragging.  It is flat embarrassing.  Even when I shop for cucumbers at the store, I look around to see if any weirdos are standing by.  I never feel them for freshness.  I just throw them in the basket and hope for a crunchy one.  God I hate a limp cucumber.  Sorry.  That was uncalled for.  But really.  It's a funny thing for someone to shop for the most phallic of fruits.  I try not to think about it.  Just shop.  Do not think.  But the cucumber area, next to the perfectly acceptable peppers, is a little shady.

So these freaks of gourd nature loved our garden soil and compost.  Or maybe I was supposed to cut them before they got too big.  I really don't know.   They tasted great.  I made cucumber salad, cucumber water, cucumber slices for my eyes, cucumber smoothies, cucumber salsa, cucumber sandwiches.  I am quite sick of them.  But I am still fascinated with the enormity of their presence.  I took photos...and might share them, if you can keep them to yourself and not send them to the Facebook.  Because if you do send them to Facebook,  my cucs and I could go viral.  We will have our own fan club with a web page and everything.   Then I will have to go on tour.  I will have to get an extra seat on the plane like Willie does for his guitar.  It will be weird, but I will be rich.  And that will be good.  Unless there is a kind of secret cucumber mutiny that will take place in my sleep.  And we are back to The Invasion of the Body Snatcher movie nightmares that finally ended when I was 21.  I was 13 when I saw that movie.  Even now when I hear someone mixing something in the kitchen that has that "sound" (Walt says tuna salad has that sound), it makes me look around for slimy alien types at my window.   So maybe I will not share the photos with you.   Fame is fleeting in the gardening world.  I mean whatever happened to that guy who grew that 1000 pound pumpkin?  Missing, I'm sure.

Today was kind of ceremonial in a way.  I pulled up the last vine in cucumber land.  They had run their course.  They weren't trying to hurt anyone.  They were just following nature's rules and all of her glory.  She gave them super powers and I ate them.  All 24 of them.  It was their destiny to be the stars in our side yard.  Who knew that these little plants from....from...now, where did we get the starter plants from?  Friends?  Home Depot?  Or maybe from the crazy lady selling beans on the side of the road in Austin.  I cannot remember, but I have a hunch.  Hunch is a funny word.  Hunch.  I do think that this is the first time I have ever typed hunch.  Hunch is underused, if I may say so myself.  One doesn't hear it in songs, poems or rhyme.  Maybe in an limerick or two.  But kind of a sad little word in the word world.   I might start a word revolution to bring it back.  

Maybe the special cucumbers were grown next to the mushrooms that are growing.  I only ate a few.  I feel funny.

So our harvest is postponed until further notice.  The Texas heat has settled in and things are looking a little leggy.  My tomatoes are bursting out of their cages, but are afraid to turn red.  But when they do, I will be up at the crack of morning to pick them.  That mama bird can wait another day.  So far the score is 15-1,  in her favor.  I feel like I can go out before sunrise now...now that the cucumbers are gone.



Monday, July 21  11:32 PM        5 1/2  hours until sunrise.







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