Eating Bugs

Quito, 1954. My mother comes excitedly home from the market with a package of shrimp, the first she’s found since we arrived from Barcelona, where shrimp was only one of several marine species in our Sunday paella. She places the package in the sink and asks the indigenous maid, Maria—black braids, embroidered blouse, felt skirt—to wash them in preparation for cooking. Maria opens the package, takes one look at the contents, and runs out of the kitchen, her braids streaming behind her, screaming that those bugs in the sink are just like the bugs with many legs that you find curled up under a stone, and she would rather die than touch one, much less eat it. 

It’s my first lesson in gastronomic relativity, in which I realize that what we like to eat or can’t bear to even think of eating is determined more by where we come from than by the merits of the thing on our plate. Ecuador is replete with challenges to gastronomic provincialism. There is the Andean village where at dusk small flying beetles take to the air, and are chased by swarms of little boys who catch and eat them. “They are sweet,” they tell us, munching. And there is the Saturday afternoon ritual when native families sit in front of their houses ridding each other’s scalp of lice, which they eat--a practice that supposedly helps to protect them against typhoid. And in the Amazon basin, we are told, people hunt monkeys with blow guns and boil them whole…. 

In Spain, before we went to South America, everything that I ate was anatomically correct: small fish were served entire on my plate, and I don’t remember being grossed out by their fishy eyes looking up at me, or by the knee caps and hip joints of rabbits and chickens, or by the chicken’s comb, which my  grandmother used to save for me. 

But the years have changed me. Long before I became vegetarian I stopped eating chicken thighs, because I couldn’t bear the sight of all the muscles and tendons; then I stopped eating chicken breasts (those ribs!); and then I stopped eating chicken altogether. Now, wishing I had the energy and resourcefulness to be vegan, I make-do with vegetables and dairy products, with an occasional can of salmon or sardines to boost my protein intake. 

I recently read “Grub,” an article in the September 6 issue of The New Yorker about entomophagy, or the practice of eating insects. Given the expanding human population and the diminishing resources of the planet, insects offer an ecologically sustainable source of high-quality protein, so it becomes almost a moral duty for us all to support the companies that are working to make entomophagous cuisine available to the world at large—and that includes actually eating their products. 

This is something that I will happily do as long as I cannot tell what I am eating. That means no legs, no antennae, no compound eyes, no diaphanous wings, no chewy bits of exoskeleton. Give me bugs ground into anonymous, homogeneous powder, and I will ingest not only cute, small things like ants and ladybugs but Luna moths, tarantulas, locusts, and Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Shared by most Americans, this preference for bugs in powder form presents a problem for the “tiny livestock” industry, because insect protein, as you know if you’ve ever squashed a bug, is gooey instead of solid. But they’re working on it. 

Note that I haven’t said anything about flavor. But mix some insect powder with an egg substitute, dredge in bread crumbs, fry lightly in olive oil, and what’s not to like? I just celebrated Labor Day with a sad little vegetarian patty made of mostly beans and corn. After that, critter croquettes don’t sound half bad to me. 

Rethinking Showers

Good grooming, advises Amy Vanderbilt in the 1967 edition of her book of etiquette, which I received as a wedding present, means “a daily, and often twice daily, shower or bath, [and] fresh underwear and stockings daily or twice daily….” Even in my most perfectionistic moments I was not insane enough to follow her advice to the letter, but since my arrival in the land of endless hot water nine years earlier, I had taken to heart the American custom of daily showering and frequent shampooing. “You’ve washed your hair again?” my mother would exclaim as I struggled to fit the dryer hood over my twenty-seven rollers. She was also amazed that, along with my schoolmates, I felt obliged to wear a different outfit every day, which meant tossing everything I had worn the day before into the washing machine. 

Back then, America’s bathroom shelves mostly featured a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo. But in the ensuing decades bath products proliferated to include soaps for different kinds of skin, shampoos for different kinds of hair, conditioners (both rinse-out and leave-in), and body scrubs, butters, and gels. Showers grew longer as we applied the right product to the right body part and then made sure that whatever we had slathered on was sluiced down the drain. 

Now, trillions of gallons of water and mountains of plastic bottles later, things may be changing. According to the  New York Times, during the pandemic many Americans stopped showering every day, and were amazed when their body did not exude pestilential smells, their skin did not erupt in gruesome infections, and their scalp did not drip grease onto their shoulders. 

On the contrary, many people who had been bedeviled with dry, flaky, itchy skin noticed that the condition improved when they stopped scrubbing every square inch of their bodies every single day. And, when given a break from too-frequent shampoos and blow drying, formerly lank, straw-like hair showed its gratitude by growing glossier and more manageable.

With an eight-minute shower using up to 17 gallons of water, not to mention the electricity to heat that water, plus the products being washed down the drain, the trend towards less-frequent showering is good news for the environment. But why stop there? As long as we’re moderating our cleaning compulsions, we should think about laundry. 

If we had to wash clothes by hand we would think twice before tossing a shirt we’ve only worn once into the dirty clothes basket. But since washing machines are here to do the work, that carefree flick of the wrist at the end of the day requires less time and energy than looking at the shirt, deciding if it can be worn again, and hanging it carefully on a hanger. 

The Swedish designer Gudrun Sjoden believes that we should reevaluate our laundry habits: “Generally we all wash far too often! Wear your clothes until they are dirty, before which you can air your clothes and remove individual stains.” I know how to air a grievance, but I’m not sure how you air a shirt (by hanging it out the window?) but lately I have taken to hanging outfits I’ve worn once or twice in the bathroom overnight to get rid of whatever noxious odors may be clinging to them. As for removing individual stains by hand and then wearing the item again, I haven’t reached that level of ecological virtue yet. 

This is a world away from Amy Vanderbilt, who advised us to “wear a simple, starched [my italics] house dress, a clean one daily, if you must do housework…” Once the house was sparkling, the dress went into the hamper, since changing for dinner was one of the hallmarks of gracious living: “Fresh clothes and make-up, even if you are to be alone with the children for a simple meal, are psychologically sound and bring a needed change in the day’s pace.” 

Her writing bursts with the exuberance of an era when belief in progress and the endless availability of resources was at its peak. It is also a celebration of indoor plumbing, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other mod cons that made possible this manic changing of dresses and stockings, showering and grooming, even in the absence of domestic staff.

No wonder so many housewives in mid-century America became addicted to Valium. Today our stress comes from a different source: the knowledge of the havoc that our way of life has wreaked on the planet, and our obligation to do something about it right now, by whatever means are available to each of us, even if it requires giving up habits that would make Amy turn in her grave.

Ant Jihad (with apologies to E. O. Wilson)

At first, only a few scouts showed up in the mudroom. They ran discreetly along the base of the walls, and I was not alarmed. "It's a sign of spring" I said to the cat Telemann. I have never begrudged the occasional ant a few crumbs from my table. Ants don't frighten me the way spiders do, and I admire their work ethic and organizational talents. But soon those scouts were followed by an entire army, an army that was marching towards the litter box.

The litter that I provide for Telemann is the most ecologically pure on the planet, free from artificial scents, and made of corn. It gives off a mild sweet smell, which is so lovely that when I add fresh handfuls to the box Telemann has been known to take a taste. Now it looked like, along with the rest of America, my ants were addicted to corn-based sugars, and had sent a colonizing army to ensure an endless supply of the stuff.

In the past, I had dealt with ant incursions with a spray of water mixed with a few drops of dish soap. This not only killed the ants, but destroyed the pheromone trail that led others in their wake. It was simple; it was green; and it always worked.

I happened to have a bottle of the solution in the cabinet under the sink. I gave it a good shake, and sprayed along the ant column. The little creatures scurried out of the way, trying to avoid the deadly spray, then curled up in agony and eventually dwindled to little black motionless specks, and I felt like a vengeful deity wreaking havoc on hapless mortals. It was a miniature version of the kind of spectacle that I cannot bear to watch on TV.

The soapy solution worked for a while, but soon new battalions of ants arrived, and were making off with golden nuggets of corn litter. I sprayed more abundantly this time, leaving little slippery pools on the linoleum, then refilled my bottle and resprayed. But back in the nest the ant draft boards were calling up fresh recruits, and the army kept coming.

I googled DIY ant repellents. The techniques ranged from spreading coffee grounds on the ant trails, to smothering the insects under a paste of cornstarch and water. But the most popular solutions involved the use of essential oils, especially peppermint.

I happened to have a bottle of peppermint oil left over from an unsuccessful attempt to discourage field mice in pre-Telemann days. These being desperate times, I ignored the instructions to dilute the oil with water or witch hazel, and sprinkled the concentrated oil directly on the ants.

As with the soapy water, the results were instantaneous, at least for the ants that came in contact with the oil. The mudroom was now littered with tiny cadavers, which I left in the hope of demoralizing the troops, but more still kept coming. I sprinkled more oil. 

“What on earth is that smell?” my spouse asked. “It makes my eyes water.” Not only did the entire house smell like a bag of cough drops, but I was starting to worry about the stuff’s effect on Telemann’s willingness to use the litter box. When he was a kitten and I was trying to keep him away from a certain house plant, I had bought a bottle of cat repellent. Its main ingredient was peppermint oil.

If the ants were attracted by the corn-based litter, the obvious solution was to switch to a different litter. But I didn’t want a different litter. I wanted to stick with my ecologically pure brand, and I didn’t want to disturb Telemann’s bathroom habits.

I returned to the DIY sites, some of which sang the praises of white vinegar. I happened to have a gallon of it, which I had bought in a vain attempt to control static cling in the laundry. I dumped the soap solution out of the spray bottle and replaced it with vinegar. The ants were no longer marching in columns, but had broken ranks and were crisscrossing the mudroom floor, raping and pillaging. The ones dispatched to colonize the kitchen had reached the cabinets, in search of the toaster.

I flooded the mudroom and the kitchen with vinegar. Again, several ants perished on the spot, but more took their place, ready to give their lives for corn litter. Now the house smelled like a salad bowl. I was opening windows to air out the place when a friend came by. I apologized for the smell and told her my sorry tale. “Why don’t you just get some ant bait?” she said.

And so I did. I hid six cookie-shaped, non-green, non-DIY bait dispensers in various spots in the mudroom and kitchen. Within two days, the ants were gone.

Ant bait consists of an attractant that is also a poison. The ants carry it back into their nest, where eventually it exterminates the colony. The EPA allows the manufacturers to keep the inert ingredients secret from the consumer. Who knows what environmental outrage my ant baits perpetrated? Perhaps a titmouse ate a poisoned ant, and got a stomach ache, or even died.

Should I have persevered with the oil and vinegar? Should I have switched to a non-organic litter? Should I have learned to coexist with my ants, and if so, how bad would things have gotten? Would they finally have had their fill of cat litter and left of their own accord, or would they have turned our cottage into a giant ant hill, like those termite mounds in Africa?

The alacrity with which I jumped on the ant bait solution has humbled me, and softened slightly my attitude towards pesticide-spraying farmers and wolf-shooting ranchers. I still don’t approve of what they’re doing, but I now know that there lurks in my supposedly green heart the same hot rage that fuels their abuses.

New Gloves, Etc.

My old black leather gloves were falling apart, so when the sun came out for a couple of hours the other day I drove to T.J. Maxx, which is not too far from where I now live.

Lined with car dealerships and fast-food restaurants, the road between my house and TJM is not what I think of as the real Vermont, but I reminded myself that in the decade I spent in my beloved, store-free village, I had to shop for most of my clothes at the church rummage sale.

None of the leather gloves at TJM fit me. When had women evolved five-inch-long fingers?  Might this be a sign from the universe that I should forego leather in favor of artificial fabric? After all, if I refuse to eat a dead cow, it makes no sense to clothe my fingers with the skin of one.

Luckily, the non-leather gloves on the rack weren’t all fuzzy and bulky. I found a sleek pair that fit perfectly. It even had a frivolous little strip of black faux fur (no rabbits harmed) around the wrist.

At home, I got scissors and went to separate the gloves, which were tightly bound together with those annoying bits of plastic filament. (One end is always easy to grasp, cut, and throw in the trash--you can’t recycle the things--but the shorter end invariably springs out of my hands and disappears into the carpet.)

Attached to the gloves by more plastic ties were four labels of various thicknesses. One announced, in gold-embossed letters on stiff black cardboard, that the gloves were weatherproof. Another assured me that the strip of fur around the wrist was faux. (Wouldn’t it be great if the manufacturers of faux news felt equally obliged to describe it as such?)

The third label stated the price, $14.99 (compare at $20). And the fourth explained that those reinforcing bits on the tips of the index and thumb made the gloves “touch screen compatible,” so that, should I need to check my Facebook page while standing in the middle of a blizzard, I won’t have to take them off.

By the time I had disposed of the four labels, I was feeling less sanguine about my purchase. Sure, neither cows nor rabbits had perished for the sake of the gloves, but some tree somewhere had been amputated to make those tags.

That wasn’t the only reason I felt guilty, however: I had bought more than gloves on my shopping trip.

We all know about the environmental cost of the clothing trade. I once heard a researcher describe the rivers near the manufacturing centers in China, which run all the colors of the rainbow with the dyes used on the fabrics.  Every time I walk into a clothing store, I think about those rivers.

But as I pushed my cart along the aisles of TJM, the profusion of colors, textures, and shapes made my head spin. And the prices! When did clothes get so cheap? When I was a teenager, getting a new sweater was a memorable occasion, but now sweaters, unaffected by trumpian sanctions, are practically a dime a dozen.

Outside, there was snow on the ground and the wind was blowing. The old sweaters in my closet had all sprouted a crop of pills, while here in the store, at easy reach of my hand and wallet, hung hundreds of sweaters, unpilled, just my size, just my colors, fresh all the way from China.

Reader, I caved. I bought not one, not two, but three.

At the checkout, I handed the clerk the sweaters and gloves, and my canvas New Yorker bag.

“What is this?” the clerk asked, pointing to the bag.

“It’s my bag,” I said.

“You want me to put your things in there?”

“Yes, please.”

She sighed. She folded the sweaters and began stuffing them and the cruelty-free gloves into the bag. “It’s hard to get it all in,” she said, as the line of customers behind me grew.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

But I really wasn’t. I felt guilty about the sweaters, but at least I’d saved a plastic bag.

Despoiling the Amazon

When my parents and I lived in Quito, Ecuador in the 1950s, the Amazon jungle wasn't what it is now: fragile, endangered, dying the death of a thousand cuts. Instead, it was a dangerous, fierce, human-hating place that you had to vanquish, or die.

The Ecuadorian government would sell you hundreds of acres of forest for a few sucres. But only fools took up the offer. One of them, the husband of my math tutor, had accepted the government's deal and was now rotting alive (mosquitoes, amoebas, leeches, niguas that would crawl under your toenails and there expand until the nails fell off), getting drunk and going mad in his hacienda in the sweltering forest east of the Andes. Every night, while he slept exhausted after a day of chopping  paths with his machete, the jungle would stretch green tendrils over the newly-cleared ground, and within a couple of days, the path had vanished.

The only people who could survive in the forest, we were told, were the native tribes--some of which had never been seen by white people--who were forever fighting each other and shrinking the heads of their decapitated enemies.

Nevertheless, my parents and I did occasionally dip our toes in the ocean of green that extended from the eastern slopes of the Andes all the way to the Pacific. And whenever we parked our 1944 Dodge on a village square, the inhabitants would approach, offering samples of the local fauna for us to buy.

For the first trip, however, my parents decided to trust the public transportation system rather than the old Dodge. We rode in a colectivo, a kind of minibus crammed with people and their parcels and  chickens. As soon as we arrived at our destination, a scarlet macaw was thrust into my mother's hands by its eager owner. The bird was the size of a half-grown hen, all head and massive beak and trailing tail feathers. His plumage exuded a curious, acidic smell. He perched on a broom handle, and when jostled uttered blood-curdling shrieks. To us Europeans, accustomed to starlings, sparrows, and the occasional hoopoe, this was the most extraordinary bird we had ever seen.

As for the macaw, the moment he saw my mother he fell passionately in love. All the way back to Quito, as the colectivo bounced on the cobbled Inca roads, whenever we tried to relieve my mother of the bird and the broomstick he would begin his ear-splitting protests, not stopping until he was restored to her.

In Quito, he lived on a perch in the backyard. Whenever my mother came out the kitchen door he would flutter down from his perch, waddle over to her, and rub his head against her leg, his eyes half-closed in ecstasy. He never had much use for the rest of us. He lived for a good while, and then we found him one morning, dead of a chill, or of longing for his native jungle, or of unrequited passion for my mother.

On another trip to the Amazon we ended up with a pair of toucans in a cage made of twigs. They were very young and obviously sick, and they barely made it back to Quito before expiring. They were succeeded by a sloth, who was so disconcertingly slow-moving that one day we concluded he was dead. My father drove him to a taxidermist to be stuffed but, just in time, the sloth blinked and languidly extended one long arm, and was reprieved.

At about this time the second violinist of my father's quartet was given a meltingly adorable ocelot kitten, all broad paws and wide eyes. Since the three single members of the quartet shared a house with my parents and me, I was sometimes allowed to pet Pepita, who all too soon morphed into an intractable dragon, spitting and clawing at whomever approached her. At one point she contracted an infection, and it took the entire quartet to hold her down (taking care not to injure their musician's hands) and administer the sulfa drugs that the vet had prescribed.

The final, most extraordinary acquisition was a marmoset. We had just arrived in the then small village of Puyo and were standing in the perennial tropical drizzle when a man approached and said, pointing to a woman behind him, "I have an animal for you." My parents, in the course of our travels through those impoverished regions, had occasionally been offered children, and they thought for an alarming moment that he was referring to the woman. But when she lifted her long, black hair we saw, perched on her shoulder, a tiny monkey the size of my hand.

I was so instantly besotted that I couldn't utter a sound. My father looked at me, handed the man some coins and, wonder of wonders, the little monkey was mine.

In the jungle between Puyo and Baños, February, 1956 

Back in Quito, the marmoset turned our house into her personal amusement park, swinging from coat to coat in the hall closet, detaching with great effort the inner soles from our shoes, undoing my shoelaces as I sat doing my homework, and stealing pencils which she would heft over her shoulder and hide in a corner. At mealtimes, she would hold a single banana slice with both hands like a hamburger and munch away. When the sun went down she would snuggle under my sweater, uttering soft, bird-like twitters. At night she slept next to me on a doll bed, inside a sheepskin bag that my mother had made for her.

She lived with us for two years and then, one day while my mother and I were at home, she fell into the toilet and drowned before we could rescue her. Her death left me as bereft as if I had lost a sibling.

Often at night I think about that trail of little dead bodies that we left behind during our years in Ecuador. What were we thinking? The fact is, we weren't. Or not in the way that we now think about animals. We fed them and housed them and gave them rudimentary veterinary care. But we didn't think about their needs as truly sentient beings, capable, like us, of missing the companionship of their own species, of languishing for lack of freedom, of perishing of nostalgia for home.

Except for some breeds of marmoset, all our former pets are now on the endangered species list. By 2030, if the present rate of deforestation continues, more than a quarter of their jungle will be lost to logging, mining and oil drilling. If you think of the planet as a living, breathing organism, the desecration of the Amazon will be equivalent to cutting off half of one of its lungs.

The macaws, toucans, sloths, ocelots, and marmosets will die, not one by one like they did at our house, but by the millions. And when all the green has turned to brown, we will know that the human race has finally vanquished the Amazon.

Farewell To Scallops

Scallops, those marshmallows of the sea, are one of my favorite foods--soft, pleasantly fibrous, slightly sweet with the barest hint of fishiness. 

I often order them broiled at the neighborhood $12-entree restaurant.  I also buy them frozen, in plastic bags, at the supermarket.  I like to shake a few of them into a marinara sauce, or into a bechamel which I then stir into a casserole with spinach or broccoli and pasta.  No fat, no salt, no bones.  Who can argue with a scallop?

I usually approach the supermarket's fish department with caution.  Just because it's fish doesn't mean it's good for you or for the planet.  For years I served my family big hunks of pink, buttery, melt-in-your-mouth salmon, bursting with protein and omega-3 oils, and affordable to boot.  Then I learned  that the pinkness was due to injected dye, and the affordability was due to fish-farming practices that fatten salmon on toxic swill and destroy natural coastlines.

I took farm-raised salmon (and tilapia, catfish, etc.) off the menu, and saved up for occasional spartan servings of $12 lb. wild-caught fish.  I also spurned wild-caught fish from other hemispheres, envisioning the hurt looks on the ruddy faces of our local purveyors of pastured pork if they saw me buying swordfish from Ecuador or flounder from New Zealand.

With my seafood options thus severely restricted, scallops seemed pretty harmless, lying white and faceless in their transparent bag.  Probably frozen at sea, too, and therefore fresh.  Wonderfully adaptable to so many dishes, and perfect (pour exactly what you need out of the bag) for the modest requirements of a household of two.

Imagine my horror this evening when, slashing open a brand-new bag of scallops in preparation for dinner, I happened to see in small print, on the label, "farm-raised product of China."

I had nothing else that I could put on the table on short notice, so into the tomato, green pepper and garlic sauce went the industrially-farmed Chinese scallops and their retinue of stowaway life forms, the whole served on a substratum of brown rice.  They were delicious, those scallops, sweet with the taste of all things that must come to an end.

As someone who grew up eating a different species of seafood--freshly caught from the still pristine Mediterranean--almost every day of the week, I find saying goodbye to scallops sad.  In my dark moments I imagine a future when, between dietary dictates and ecological concerns, cheese, then wheat, corn, coffee, eggs, rice and even olive oil will be banished from my diet, and I will be reduced to eating only my own home-grown chard, hold the salt and butter.

Feeling Green

Went to the dump today, and please bear with me while I show off a bit.

In these rural parts, there is no municipal trash collection.  There is a private company that picks up trash, but it's very expensive, so most everybody goes to the dump.

Going to the dump is a big deal, which is why we don't do it often.  The nearest dump is over the line in New York.  The New York recycling handbook, which tells you how to classify your household waste,  is six pages long.

There are three categories of glass--clear, green, and brown;  two categories of cans--tin and aluminum;  three kinds of plastic containers;  and no fewer than seven categories of paper:  newspaper, newspaper inserts, magazines, books, office paper, corrugated cardboard, and boxboard.  And then there is sheer "refuse," the dregs of our daily lives, the stuff for which no redeemable use can be found.  

You don't have to pay for recyclables, no matter how many tons you cart to the dump.  But you have to pay for your refuse by affixing $1.50 stamps (which you have to buy at the Town Office) to your  garbage bags.  The dump attendants--surprisingly cheerful,  easygoing men--take a look at your bags and tell you how many stamps to put on each.

On dump day, my husband--who saw Alice's Restaurant at an impressionable age--goes over every single scrap of paper we have generated over the last month and meticulously rips out every allusion to our name, address, and SSN, and assigns each scrap to one of the seven categories.

Meanwhile, I collect the garbage, bottles, cans and plastic and carry them to the garage.  I do not collect the deposit bottles or the plastic bags, which go back to the supermarket on a separate trip.  The black plastic pots that nursery plants come in go back to a nursery that reuses them.

My husband's next job, and one at which he excels, is to compress the refuse bags to their absolute minimum, so that we will incur the smallest possible charge.  Which brings me to today's triumph:  our month's worth of refuse, after compression, filled about half of a tall kitchen garbage bag.

Credit for this goes mostly to the chickens, who consume whatever we don't eat, and to the rural nature of this place, which keeps us close to home and away from stores.

I am usually more than glad to be living in the Green Mountains, but there are some exceptions:  days when it rains on top of snow and then freezes;  days when I have to drive thirty minutes to find a spool of brown thread;  and dump days.  

Thinking about it, though, I realize that these are the very days that keep our mountains green.  The difficult weather keeps the flatlanders away;  the paucity of malls and box stores keeps the landscape bucolic and the traffic light;  and the dump--well, when you have to handle and classify and remove from your house every single piece of waste you have generated you can't help berating yourself for your consuming ways, and vowing to live more greenly.

The Incredible Eleven-Foot-Tall Sunflower

Several times in my gardening career I bought packets of sunflower seeds and planted them carefully in fertile, loose, well-watered soil.  None of those seeds ever came to anything.  On the other hand, I have had amazing luck with sunflowers planted by the birds.

Whether they drop the seeds by accident or by design, before or after passing them through their tiny digestive tracts, is a mystery to me.  All I know is that every summer a forest of sunflowers springs up around the bird feeder.  This year's crop was exceptional, but it is almost over by now.  I have pulled up the dead stalks and the empty flowers and thrown them away, with one exception:  the eleven-foot-tall sunflower.

This amazing specimen, planted by the birds in the narrow flower bed between the patio and the back porch, suffered heavy damage in a summer windstorm, which bent its stem about a foot from the ground.  I assumed that it would die then, or at least ripen and wither on schedule with its peers.  But even now, when all the other sunflowers are resting in peace on the compost heap, this one is still going strong.

                                                                                                                         
Today, before clearing out the flower bed of its summer detritus, I intended to dispose of  the bent-over marvel.  But as I put the pruning shears against the inch-thick stem, something held me back.  Not only did the plant have a number of ripening brown flower heads, but no fewer than seventeen Van Gogh-bright blooms. It would have been a crime against Nature to rip it out.

In its bent-over condition, however, it was impeding my access to the flower bed.  I called my husband, and he dragged a ladder out of the garage, and I handed him a length of green baling twine and pointed upwards, and he fastened the sunflower to the porch's rain gutter.

Now it stands in solitary splendor at the end of the denuded flower bed, calling to the chickadees who planted it to come and feast on its ripening seeds.

I never knew that chickadees were farmers.