Sexy Goobers

"Peas, peas, peas, peas.  Eating goober peas.
Goodness how delicious, eating goober peas."

My father's collection of Kingston Trio record albums has come to mind.  Why?

See.  The peanuts I planted less than a month ago have suddenly turned sexy.

Southern now, having lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line most of my life, the culture sinks deeper and deeper into my roots.  I might have to stretch to bring my father's history with me, but I can try.  As a conscientious objector in the 1940s, he worked on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia.  How's that?

Oh, and I remember him singing, "Peas, peas, peas, peas.  Eating goober peas," not often, but once in a while, maybe just with me (and the Trio).  That song, I understand, was a favorite among Confederate soldiers, especially near the end of the War when, after being cut off from rail supply lines, boiled peanuts became their emergency ration.  Maybe the Mennonites and Quakers, digging post holes and wielding shovels, sang that song, too, up on the Parkway.

Those peanut flowers surprised me this morning.  Something I've been looking forward to also appeared.

We'll be eating Blue Lake bush green beans very soon!  And something else...

"Black Beauty?" guesses Virginia.

That woman's smart.  Yes, indeed, zucchini.

Reenactment

Playing games in the cemetery,
grownups in blue and gray,
here and there a ruffled shirt,
top hat, a few little girls
in dresses, celebrating R.E. Lee,
not so popular where I grew up,
damn Yankee I will forever be,
one you can trust, someone said,
better not, I may disappoint
smelly, mothballed wool.


"Rebel flags give me the creeps," says Virginia.

"I guess you didn't see many in Manhattan," I say.

"No, we had other distractions," says she, "like Nixon in China."

[Note: Nixon in China is an opera by American composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman.]