Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

springing forward 45

were up, poking their snub, yellow- tipped noses through a fringe of
leaves.
“Oh, Mama,” Lily cried, “look what’s about to bloom—the tranquils.”
There went the last of the needles of ice around my heart, and I un-
derstood I’d be doomed to calling the jonquils tranquils for the rest of my
days. Lily is my youngest. Maybe you know how these things go. In our
family, those pink birds with the long necks are called fl ingmos because of
how their real name was cutely jumbled by my brother’s youngest child—
and that was, yikes, twenty years ago.
That’s how springtime found us: grinning from ear to ear, hauling out
our seedlings, just as the rest of our neighborhood began to haul out the
plastic lawn flingmos and little Dutch children kissing and those spooky
plywood silhouettes of cowboys leaning against trees. Lawn decoration is
high art in the South, make no mistake about it. Down here in Dixie,
people do not just fl ing out a couple or three strands of twinkly lights in
December and call it a year, no ma’am. In our town it’s common practice
for folks to jazz up their yards even for the minor decorative occasions of
Valentine’s Day and the Fourth of July, and on Easter to follow an unset-
tling tradition of hanging stuffed bunny rabbits from the crab apple trees
(by the neck, until dead, to all appearances). If they’re serious about it,
they’ll surround the cottontailed unfortunate with a ferociously cheerful
crop of dangling plastic eggs.
I grew up in this territory, and my recollection from childhood is that
every community had maybe just one person with a dolled- up yard—such
as my paternal grandmother, who was known to be gifted in the decor
department—but for the average citizen it was enough to plop a tire out
there and plant petunias in it. Or marigolds in a defunct porcelain toilet,
in neighborhoods with a different sense of decorum. But those days are
gone, my friend, and never more will it be so easy to keep up with the
Joneses.
Our recent construction work on the farmhouse had turned the front
yard into what you might euphemistically call a blank slate. (Less euphe-
mistically: mud.) With my hands full of vegetable seedlings and the wild
rumpus of spring in my head, I considered planting lettuces and red Rus-
sian kale in place of a lawn, maybe in the visage of the Mona Lisa. Or let-