After our first winter in our home, at the foot of the clothesline cross, I saw rhubarb being born. A triplet of hard pink knots, closely followed by their leaves, chartreuse and tightly crumpled. Scant weeks after the trio first elbowed their way into spring, they stood half the height of the raspberry canes beside them, their leaves wide as a child's kite.
Two batches of rhubarb ketchup, a few pans of rhubarb crisp, one rhubarb loaf, and a kettle of rhubarb stew later, I began to suspect the plants were Christians, believing as the Bible says, that "It is better to give than receive."
The Preacher doesn't eat rhubarb. It falls into his personal food group called Foreign Objects; foods that irritate the baloopa gland (another personal category). Fearing we'd soon be targeted by garden paparazzi and knowing we could never use all that rhubarb, we chopped down two of the plants and churned them deep into the earth.
Three take away two equals one - unless you're counting rhubarb. Several weeks later, according to its own unique arithmetic, our rhubarb count was four.
This second year in our home, having outsmarted the born-agains with the help of weed-killer, only one rhubarb plant sits at the foot of the raspberry patch. But it has more than compensated for its martyred companions, producing a multitude of arm's-length stalks, some almost two inches thick at the base, with leaves a good metre across.
"We'd better harvest this stuff," I said, a tad timidly. So just before it reached the tops of the spruce grove, the Preacher and I approached the rhubarb with knives. I yanked every mature stalk from the plant's base and manhandled them into the wheelbarrow. The Preacher stood near, hacking off the leaves. "I'm taking it all to Judy," I said. "I've promised her some."
"Sure." With a grateful sigh, he watched me drive off.
I found our friend behind her house, bending over the riding lawnmower, her back to me. I called, but she couldn't hear me over the mower. Halfway across the yard I tried again. Still nothing. Finally, about three feet downwind, and not wanting to scare her by touching her, I called, "Yoo hoo!"
That time she heard. Hollered back, and leapt almost as high as the mower was wide. "I thought you were a skunk!" she managed when we both calmed down. (I'm still puzzling over how a grown woman in green, wearing deodorant and carrying a grocery sack can be mistaken for a black and white, low-slung, odiferous member of the rodent family.)
A week later, our solitary rhubarb plant has begun again. I see it each time I wander over to the raspberry patch to check on our coming crop. Every time I look, it's larger. Stronger. Wider. Preparing to give, getting ready to prompt people to share, to eat together, and if they're really blessed, to laugh.
Lord, make this born-again person more like rhubarb.
