Looks a little like grass
Yeah, right. Spinach! They’re probably just little weeds, I thought.
My wife called me Friday. I was at work and she was at Jones, one of my two gardens. She wanted to know if there was anything she could do for me while she was there. Not really, I said, except check how the seeds I’d planted twelve days earlier are doing. Might something have sprouted, yet? Nothing had when I last checked five days before.
“I think spinach is growing,” she told me. “It kind of looks like little bits of grass but I’m pretty sure I know what spinach looks like.” I was skeptical. I forget how I answered her. I probably imagined I answered politely, respectfully, but she told me later she could tell I didn’t believe her. I didn’t. What nerve, I know, but I didn’t. She must have been mistaking weed seedlings for spinach, I suspected. I want to blame my response on my ambivalent attitude toward seeds, my mixture of admiration for and disbelief in their ability to actually sprout, but really, it was just good old-fashioned arrogance.
