Salad and Simile: A Defense of Cultivation

Abstract

Sydney Lea Before you, spinach green as lucre. You dream of opportunity?perhaps a lucky letter. But hearts of iceberg lettuce yellow like junk mail. Disappointment in early June, a season of legumes, new roots and leaves. Time will pass: the fern of the asparagus turn to feathers, as for sweeping woe like dust that settles, needing re-arrangement. Your mind has wandered from the bowl like a woodchuck from his burrow to devour odd weeds. Sitting, my Candide, conning greens like tea-dregs, you conjure bleak perspectives. But why not a possible beneficence? You are what you eat: conversely, though, what you eat is you? the pear tomato centers in the dish not like a jaundiced hope but like the sun you wished for months ago when deep ice sealed the ever-anxious tubers (parsnip, rutabaga, turnip) and the cover crop of vetch. Good salads may be prologues to bad suppers: so a proverb has it. Thus your salad was a simile before it grew. Why not toss it? Assume these bitter herbs and shoots you chew