attention shoppers

I'm on a radish kick lately. I've been having radish and hummus on toast sandwiches everyday. Problem is they're not my radishes. They're store bought.

The more I grow food, the more I dislike the stuff the got in stores. It's too perfect. Like archetypes or ideals, symbols from dreams. Not real.

From a recent batch, these mutant fellows popped out. What made them this way? Are they two seeds that fused together? No two seeds of mine have ever fused together. In my mind, these are ghosts of the perfection machine. We Americans are so damned fussy.

I cut off their tops and stood them up side by side, like a couple in the mall. Then I photographed them. I thought about adding googly eyes in Photoshop. Instead, I beefed up the saturation to make them look nuclear.

My biggest struggle has been root vegetables. For the longest time I thought it was because the soil is too dense. I've been thinking of adding sand. Then I talked to the lady at Longview Gardens and she said it's a fertilizer thing. I will get this root thing down. All else is going gangbuster. I have officially found my green thumb.

Few things make me happier than gardening. I am pondering an essay about my struggles with root vegetables, which will be interwoven with anecdotes about my settling into this neighborhood and my relationship with Allie. But I am afraid it is too corny and obvious of a metaphor. I've even contemplated a sentence about my routes through the neighborhood becoming more and more intricate and satisfying. I keep discovering new things, feeling more and more at home, healthy, thriving.

Sometimes life is too faky, like totally contrived fiction.