Love at Long-Last Bite

“We’ll give you the recipe before we die.”

My grandmother and mother uttered these words as they shoo’d my two brothers and myself out of the kitchen into a blistering July afternoon. We had been victims of child labor all morning, scrubbing the thorns off several flats of “cukes” – pickling cucumbers. We had watched as herbs were washed and laid out on flour-sack towels to dry, and then stuffed into the earthenware crock that sat at the top of the basement steps.

”It’s a secret.”

What the two of them did before sealing the crock was a mystery.

After my grandmother died, my mother stopped making pickles. And, the recipe was still in her head when she suffered a massive stroke that took her to God’s kitchen.

I miss those pickles. The buzz and fizz they left on my tongue has never, not once, been duplicated. Now, my family is urging me to at least try to duplicate what happened those July days so long ago.

I have never been able to find the exact breed of cuke until a month ago. I found the SEEDS for the cuke. This has lead to new adventures in horticulture.

Horroriculture is more like it.

I have been dancing around the rim of the GMO debate [not really a debate; more like a doomsday saga]. I’ve faced the reality that not only are my feet made of clay, the soil on the hills up Ave. Pico is, too.

My road to pickles has grown new connections . . . how culling affects my yield as well as that of the Republican presidential candidates. The discovery of bad bugs that disguise themselves as good ones.

Seems this applies to elections as well as gardens.