CANNIBALS

"Cauliflower is a cabbage with education..." -Mark Twain

Mr. and Mrs. West had a garden. Wow did they ever. Prize winning. I used to love to visit .  They had a string hammock strung between two apple trees. In the fall those trees would be heavy with fruit. Apples falling into your basket.  The hammock was  a little scratchy, but for a while you could sail away until the bees pestered you. Mr. West liked to nap there, with his favourite book on bugs.

Neat rows between raised wooden boxes  promised  great things. Kale, lettuce so huge they dwarfed your own head, beans and cabbage. It was the cabbage  they won prizes for. Cabbage so dense that even earwigs had trouble finding hiding places in the slippery green leaves

My favourite were the raspberries.  So high. So tall.  Mr. West, a big, tall man,  liked to climb on a chair to pick them, while Mrs. West stood below. Sometimes, Mr. West found himself falling and his wife caught his jacket so he could right  himself.

Every year, the raspberries were taller and wider and fuller.My mother marvelled at them. So high. They would give her a cabbage each time we came. We were afraid of the cabbage. It was alive.  The cabbage usually sat in my lap on the ride home.I would eye it apprehensively. 

Earwigs crawled out, exuberantly, onto the car seat. And onto me.  At which  my mother  shrieked, pulling our car over to the side of the road. She and I would dance up and down , smacking the nasty creepy crawlies at random. 

Mr. and Mrs. West had told us that earwigs were maternal  and actually took care of her eggs, cleaning them up to three months. The babies would hatch,  and live with their mother, until she died. Then they ate her.

Delicious.

Each time we’d give the offending cabbage to our neighbour.  She made sauerkraut. Always gave us a jar. We’d give the jar to the other neighbour beside us. And so it went. 

But we couldn’t stop ourselves from  visiting Mr. and Mrs. West.He knew all about Earwigs. “They live in hoses and small places,” Mr. West told me. “They hold their prey and chomp away… Cannibals.”

 One year, they planted Velvet Queen Sunflowers by the fence. Award winning, of course. They would give us sunflowers and a cabbage to take home each time.

Earwigs seemed to like our warm car.  Each time we left the cabbage and the sunflowers with the neighbour next door. Another jar of sauerkraut would be winged our way. 

My mother felt compelled to try and have a garden, so she tore up a strip of grass and planted sweet peas. From then on, every year it was sweet peas. No earwigs. It was never like Mr. and Mrs. West. But it was HER garden. That and the nasturtiums with their black aphids crawling all over the stalks.  HER aphids. Mr. West told her to spray them with castile soap  mixed with vinegar and water. It worked.  

 Mr. and Mrs. West  died the next  year. Mr. West finally   fell from  his gardening chair, crushing  Mrs. West . They lay there amongst their beloved cabbages till the next day, when their daughter found them. 

Their place eventually sold, the beautiful  garden fell into ruin. The old cabbages lay in their boxes. The sunflowers withered.  

 Every time we passed a cabbage in the store, my mother would  peer at  the pale green  waxy things, looking for a glimpse of earwigs. We would stare until the produce guy would ask us what we were doing.

“Looking for cannibals….” My mother would say and move on.

 

Photographs 2022