The First Thing Green

I planted Brussels sprouts this past year.  The greenhouse nearby, you know the one I mean, with its hay bales outside and rows of potted mums, had a perennial sale in the spring.  Must have been sometime in June if I recollect correctly and if you bought one tray of plants, you had to take the second along for free.  I couldn’t get out of there.  Every time I reached for something, I was forced to take an additional pot with the other free hand.

Anyway, I ended up with a tray of Brussels sprouts.  Not cause I wanted them, but because I was strong-armed into the deal.  At that time there was no room in the regular vegetable garden, so I cleared some space in a particularly anemic row of blueberries and put them in.  Well, they grew, but don’t ask me how.  The soil had been amended with enough acid to fill a battery.  The blueberries were already responding, but I had no idea the sprouts would do well in such an environment.

They filled out.  I don’t know if you’ve ever tried them, but those sickly little cabbage plants grow past their awkward looking stage pretty quickly and before you know it, you have these stalwart plants with guts and glory and the like.  The first forming cabbages look like marbles along the sides but it takes well into September and October before they beef into the sprouts you and I see in the store.

There were bugs.  Chewing kinds and some other kind that left a frass on the lips of each lime colored head.  Then came the first frost and though the pumpkins collapsed, the sprouts held their ground.  There were mornings that the entire landscape looked like it had been carved out of ice and though the leaves of the sprouts laid low, each day as the sun warmed, their regular turgor returned.

Christmas has come and gone.  Red ribbons and fancy paper peak out of the tops of black trash bags and wag in the wind.  At this point, we’ve had enough freezes and blizzards to fill a Dairy Queen.  I can go into the field and pull some of those frozen cabbage heads off of the plant…maybe snap off a couple of crisply frozen leaves of kale along with them, come inside and watch them return to their normal texture within minutes.  Both can be chopped and thrown in a pan with pasta and cheese, or the kale can be stirred into a chicken broth with beans and sausage for a delicious soup.  It’s as though the freezing has sweetened them, yet each keeps it’s crispness and original texture.   Put it alongside a piece of peach pie made back when August held reign and you have yourself a plate of bounty.

In the melting snow and thawing land, the mustard and nettle rise again.  The first taste of the fresh earth born, the first thing green that nourishes and wakes.  Spring comes soon in the collapse of cold, in the warm gaze of my grateful eyes.  A buttery taste, a shake of salt, and a long wrapping time of warmth.