Carrots

When I was young, my grandfather had a vegetable garden beautiful enough to be featured in magazines. It never was. My grandpa was remarkably humble and spoke with a thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent, a combined effect that made some people think he was simple. He wasn't.

Perhaps I am remembering his garden through the rosy-perfection vision of time; maybe it really was the tidy, well-organized productive plot I picture in my head. Such is memory. Grandpa didn't read much, having had a fourth grade education, but as a farmer, he knew what was good for the plants and what was good for us. I do know the garden held roses, zinnias, and marigolds that attracted beneficial insects to the beets, radishes, rhubarb, tomatoes (so many tomatoes!), cucumbers squash beans and carrots.

I remember my grandfather pulling up carrots for me. I was little, and always disappointed. They were not the Barbie-leg long carrots that we bought in the grocery store. They were short, stubby, knobby, and dirty. He would wash them with the garden hose, scrubbing them with his fingers, as knobby and dirty as the carrots themselves from all the hard work he did, and hand them to me to eat: unpeeled; greens still attached. I ate them because I loved my grandfather.

I now know that Connecticut's soil isn't meant to grow those perfect slender carrots we find at the supermarket. New England's stony soil forces the roots to bend and twist into shapes unbecoming a mass-produced carrot.

Fortunately, what seemed peculiar and repulsive to me as a little girl is a huge attraction to my little boys. Our carrots from Fort Hill Farm are gnarled and twisted. The boys have not allowed me to serve the carrot pictured here. Ironically, while it lacks the look of the long Barbie-leg carrots from the store, it reminds me of a beautiful dancer's legs: twisted and en pointe, ready to pirouette- formed by local, organic soil and a farmer who knows what is good for us.