Peggy’s Prompt—010512—greens

Greens, as in veggies of the dark green persuasion—(kale, which has mysteriously gotten very popular), mustard greens, collard greens, turnip greens. We ate a lot of turnip greens and collard greens growing up. I think my grandfather probably raised them in his kitchen garden and my mother was used to eating them. We tended to eat mostly what my mother grew up with, with the exception of fish and grits, which came from my father’s side. Daddy ate his greens sprinkled with a hot sauce that my mother made from pickling tiny hot peppers that she grew in the side yard. My sister went through a phase of picking the peppers and chasing me around the yard trying to touch my lips with the cut-off end of the pepper, which would cause excruciating pain to my mouth. How Daddy could stand the heat, I’ll never know. Anyhow, I ate my greens with a dash of plain vinegar. Today we’d have to have some sort of special vinegar in an elegant bottle, infused with something straw-looking through the glass. Then, we just poured from the garden-variety vinegar bottle. The same vinegar  Mama used to clean the windows. Somehow in my adult years I lost my memory of greens, and never cooked them for my family. But now in my dotage, my 94-year old mountain man neighbor grows greens in his garden and offers them to me, and I’ve gotten back into eating greens through the fall of the year. He grows mostly kale and turnip greens. I prefer the turnip greens, probably because they taste the most familiar. Anyhow, it’s interesting how much of our childhood returns in our later years. For me, it’s the greens.