MY VINE YARD

“Like a lounge lizard who reads Flaubert” cooking otherwise keeps me healthy and on my feet for the time it takes. Picking out vine leaves from a clump of fresh harvest bitter melon greens from the side garden that many to make little when braised, is a matter of kitchen devotion and survival. Frankly I can’t eat anything else at this point in my life except greens - and fruits and legumes are included in that designation since they start out green from the soil. Yes on a Sunday when I could otherwise read all day, food for my constitution’s requirement is a tall order that just had to be done - lest faint out or meet demise. Oscar Wilde said to the brazen everything is brass, but to the vegan, yours truly, everything is vegetables. But I couldn’t love anything more. I will always have an affair with the sofrito of carrots and tomatoes and diced stalks of Chinese cabbage to sweeten my bitter vines and juice out their chlorophyll iron to sauce and vitamin me. It takes a ton of eating greens to strengthen my body (think a panda in the bamboo forest nothing else on his agenda but ruminating those greens in its mouth, as cows do too and nothing else for them save grass and meadow) to live. My yard is my forest and meadow and I am their gentle “pollinator.” Pea vines grow there with the green beans, and mustard greens are friendly neighbors to the rainbow chards, dino kales are germinating, and the society of herbs planted are playmates to them greens and edible violets and shallot blues in the small scale garden ecosystem. I mostly rely on my farmer friends in the neck of my woods for “bulk” produce purchases to supplement my own meager harvest home, and combining these “bio-carbonless-sources” feel good to be part of a food-growing community which is essential to the future of life - all Life - including our green and blue planet to be more green. Rice, pasta, bread I eat no longer “evolved” to this point reckoning my true physiological nature as herbivore; I can’t break them down no matter how hard I try. I don’t mind my incarnate self now as from a bear or a bovine - they are gentle animals, you see, and cute with a bell. Greens are music down my throat and I’m clinging these words.