by Roberta Velyn

Created on: November 17, 2010   Last Updated: December 26, 2010

I was just little - not yet going to school - but old enough to know that plants don't bite! I was exploring my Grandmother's huge sandy garden with my slightly-older brother when he told me that if I put my finger in the "mouth of a snapdragon the flower would close on my finger. I knew full well that my brother got a kick out of misleading me, but I was also experienced enough to know that he knew things that I didn't. Unwilling to let him think I believed him, I waited until he went off to play elsewhere, located the flowers in question, squatted down to eye level with a big luscious blossom and gently inserted my pointing finger. Yikes! He was telling the truth. The flower clamped down on my tiny finger! I tested several blossoms on the same plant, and then other plants. Some worked better than others, but all responded to some degree. Until that day my favorite flowers had been the sand roses, growing at the base of the veranda on the south side of the house, that closed under cloud cover and opened up to velvety glory when the sun shone. Now I had another very good reason to spend time in Grandma's garden. Not many years later, our mother recruited my brother and me to help weed our garden. The vegetables were just tiny, surrounded by miniscule pigweeds with juicy leaves deep green on top and burgundy underneath. We were instructed to pull only the tiny weeds, which we did for seemingly endless hours in the bright sun and stifling heat. Eventually Mom, who'd been working alongside us, went into the house for what seemed rather a long time. My brother and I were discussing the possibility of sneaking away when she emerged from the house with a mysterious smile on her face. We watched as she approached, carrying something cradled in her hands. Arriving back at the garden she presented me with a big, pink, icy cold Easter egg candy and my brother with a turquoise one. They were too big to be eaten whole, so we simultaneously bit into them. What a glorious sensation - intensely sweet and searingly cold, melting in our mouths. I still taste that Easter candy when I weed my own garden on a hot summer day. Some years later, when I was a pre-teen with several younger sisters and brothers, our father sent us out behind the barn to pull weeds from the shelter belt that had been planted the previous year. The trees were just twigs completely hidden in a forest of weeds. After some hours of lethargically pulling weeds between rounds of bickering, throwing lumps of

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