Ypsi Cooks

I just read this post at Dinner A Love Story about anticipation. She lays out how we have lost so many opportunities for anticipation in everything from food to phone calls. Her readers point out other losses, including having to wait for the Christmas Special. “Back in the day” TV specials came when they came, and if you missed it, as I often did, you had to wait until it came around again next year. Our kids don’t have to wait for much. They don’t even have to wait for 10AM to see sesame street. But this is one of the advantages of the garden that I pondered as Eli has helped plant peas in mid-March. He won’t even begin to see the results for 2 weeks when the first little sprouts peek out their heads. The good stuff doesn’t happen until mid-May, when I stop double checking to make sure they’re eating their vegetables, because the vines are picked clean every day. For this house, cucumbers only come when it’s hot, or when you’re at grammy’s. And while they’re always excited when someone serves strawberries, our kids recognize the ones from the farmers market (or better yet, the you-pick place) are in a whole different league.

But frankly, vegetables are not in their minds right now. Right now, the focus is Christmas. Today we light the third advent candle, and… it’s PINK! Gaudete! Joyous Sunday! The time is near. Or near-er, anyway. Last year was the first year Eli’s head wrapped around the idea of the advent candles. Every day for a week he wanted us to light a second candle. We finally thought to say, “We can’t light the second candle until we see it lit at church.” We could practically see a little light bulb switch on: this is going to take a while. And it did, and Christmas came, and we celebrated the birth of Jesus, and we tried to do more nice things to bring Him into the world just a little more. And we ate a lot of food. And we opened presents. And we enjoyed time with family and friends. And a few days later, we opened the seed catalog and asked what we should plant this year. “PEAS!” Let the anticipation begin.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 12th, 2010 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.