We wandered up and down the rows of the vegetable patch, and I marveled at everything that was just coming up. I tasted lemony sorrel and snappy fennel, and picked handfuls of tiny baby eggplant, a Japanese variety striped purple and white. In this week’s share everyone was getting new lettuce, more of those brown sugar strawberries, some rhubarb, and, new this week, the first blackberries. I was mentally testing recipes, deciding what else I’d need to spice up my home dinners, and what else I could use at the diner.
And as we walked, Leo pointed out various landmarks. Where they’d tilled an unused field and discovered a hundred-year-old coffee can filled with old pennies. Where an original well was still hidden by rotting wood planks, but was now safely fenced off. The well was repurposed and used now for irrigation in the herb garden. He’d laid raised beds in the same pattern originally planted, using an old landscape blueprint he’d found in the attic of the big house, when gardens were plotted to exacting standards.
“Back then, marigold would have been planted all the way around. It’s a great insect repellent,” he explained as we made our way through the herbs. “You needed dill, right?”
“Yeah, I’m turning some of those little cukes and green tomatoes we picked into zombie pickles,” I said.
“Should I know what that means?” he asked, kneeling down and picking a handful of dill.
“I’d hope not. Chad asked me to teach him how to make pickles. So he and Logan are coming by the diner after we close this weekend, and I’m going to show them how. The zombie part is harder to explain.”
“They want to learn how to pickle?” he asked, incredulous. He bundled the dill together, wrapping the ends with a bit of kitchen twine. “Is this enough?”
“Perfect,” I said as he offered it to me like a bouquet. And like a bouquet, I sniffed it. Mmm. Nothing smelled like warm, fresh herbs. “And you’d be surprised how many people want to know that stuff. The most popular class at the Learning Annex at UCLA is canning and pickling. A bunch of my clients used to take classes there. All these gorgeous plastic women with more money than they know what to do with, and they’re learning how to make fifty-cent fridge pickles.”
“Seriously?”
“Oh yeah. Your slow foods movement here is all about getting back to the land and local and sustainable, but it’s also a rampant food trend. And nobody knows trendy like LA wives. It makes sense, though. No one in our generation knows how to do much of that stuff.”
“Stuff like . . . ?”
“Pickling. Canning. Putting up preserves. Also sewing. If I lose a button on anything, I’m screwed. My mom knows how to sew, but I never bothered to learn. And she’s in the minority—most women these days are at least two generations away from those skills. Does your mom know how to sew?”
He threw his head back and laughed. “You’re adorable.”
“Exactly. But I bet her mom did—money had nothing to do with it. People used to know how to do these things, and now they don’t.”
“The Learning Annex. Interesting,” he said thoughtfully, rubbing his beard. “Can I come to the pickle class?”
“It’s not really a class,” I said, playing with the dill fronds. “But, sure. If you want.”
“I want.”
I ran my fingers over the frothy green herbs, feeling the silk slide across my skin. I want. I enjoyed the way that sounded, more than I cared to admit. But what I didn’t enjoy was the telltale buzz that suddenly zoomed by my ear.
“No! No no no!” I shrieked, dropping my dill and my basket and running halfway across the field before Leo knew what had happened.
“Rox! Hey, Rox!” he yelled after me, but I was running full out. “Roxie!”
I looked over my shoulder to shout back, “I told you, bees are assholes!” And because I looked over my shoulder, I tripped over a left-behind bucket, and down I went into the softly tilled dirt.
Catching up to me a few seconds later, Leo crouched down next to me. “Are you okay?” he asked, scanning me hurriedly.
“Of course.” I sighed, holding my hands over my face. “I really have this thing with bees.”
He pried my fingers loose, but didn’t release them. He inhaled deeply. “Must be that honey.”