Seeds of change: "Cucumber Kid" revisits childhood roots - first person - Brief Article

When I was a kid and the virgin wooded lot behind my house was still the best place to build a fort, my dad and I tended a garden beneath the tall pines' shade. There we grew cucumbers.

Two fat holly trees penned the garden between their prickly limbs and the pines that abutted the property line. The hollies separated Mama in the air-conditioned house from our private, sunny Eden--Daddy's and mine.

Walking back to the garden with my father each day, I stepped with bare feet around the hollies' thorny droppings and smacked away myriad insects. Never mind that the mosquitoes loved me or that on especially sunny afternoons, my nose sunburned beneath the brim of a too-big, borrowed baseball cap.

None of that mattered in the garden with Daddy, because seeing things grow was exciting.

Mama called me "The Cucumber Kid." Each spring she pulled a dozen or so tin pie plates from under the kitchen sink and doled them out to my brother and me. Daddy supplied us with silver-dollar-sized soil rounds that, when soaked with water in the pans, puffed like microwaved marshmallows. I was amazed at how those once hard, flat disks sprang up and yielded moist and fragrant dirt.

Into them we planted cucumber seeds. My finger poked eraser-sized holes into the tops and then nudged in the tiny Burpees. Then we put our pie tins on the back porch, almost forgotten about until weeks later--despite raucous thunderstorms and ravenous bugs--they magically sprouted cucumber shoots. When they were tall enough to transplant into the garden, we nestled the baby plants inside tilled rows and lovingly packed them with rich earth.

Daddy and I made a game of discovering grown cucumbers where days before there'd been only buds. We'd rustle under the leafy vines, following them to their fruit. He taught me to rub the spikes off each cucumber with my thumbs and polish the skins almost to a spit-shine. When we produced an especially fine cucumber--pine-green with an unblemished coat--Daddy would hand it to me and say, "Take that one in to your mother."

At dinner Mama would place in front of me my own bowl of sliced cucumbers. I dipped them in blue-cheese salad dressing and ate them as a first course. Sometimes I even asked for cucumbers instead of dessert, Cucumber Kid that I was.

Inevitably our garden disappeared. Bulldozers razed the woods to make room for houses. Where cucumber vines once sprawled, a dog races behind a fence, yipping at rabbits in my parents' yard.

I hadn't thought about our cucumber patch until recently, when Mama told me that Daddy has started another garden, at their cottage on the Chesapeake Bay. Mama laughed when she said the word garden. "One strawberry," she confided in me. "He says there'll be enough for shortcake."

A "short" cake it will be!

But when the time is right for harvest, I'll be there--ball cap, bug spray and all.

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