Already, I鈥檓 calling these bits of green, these brave sprouts, Lettuce Plants.聽 During the night, six pale shoots poked through the soil where they washed to the edges of the small tray I prepared a few days ago. Each stem has a tiny flag, an oval yellow-green leaf.聽 The April sky is soft grey so I鈥檝e moved the seedlings to an upstairs window. I鈥檓 trying to resist the urge to send a picture of them to my sister.
I like lettuce. I like to grow lettuce. I like to eat lettuce.聽 I like to say lettuce:聽 Let-us, a light, summery, airy, optimistic word. There鈥檚 nothing sticky about the word lettuce like the word 鈥渁llow,鈥� another word I like that pops into my head as I think about lettuce.
I found the lettuce seeds in a store one day a couple of months ago when I was walking around my new neighbourhood. I gave the seeds a shake just for the pleasure of listening to them slide around inside the paper package.聽
Not the least bit distracted by the pictures of flowers on the other packets of seeds, or it would seem, hungry, because the other vegetables held no attraction, I decided to buy the lettuce seeds.聽 I did this even though our front porch is only large enough for one flower pot and a bicycle, and our backyard is a long narrow strip of shared grass and a tiny, but promising, stick tree.
The package of seeds didn鈥檛 have a price. As my grandmother would say, this 鈥渄idn鈥檛 make a particle of difference.鈥� As I type this memory, I also can hear my mother鈥檚 voice telling me to finish weeding the row. She had a green thumb.聽
The woman at the till at the store said the seeds cost 35 cents. My first thought was, nothing costs 35 cents. I could pay for the seeds with the tap of a card, if I wanted to, but I couldn鈥檛 readily type the price of these seeds on any of the keyboards on the phones, tablets or computers I use now. Later when I opened some files and clicked on some arrows, I found a cent sign key buried under an editing sub-subsection called symbols. All along, in my mind, I could see the number 35 and C with a line through it.聽
We were the only people in the store and it didn鈥檛 matter that this transaction was taking an old-fashioned amount of time. I was sure I鈥檇 misunderstood what the woman had said.聽 Were the seeds so old they wouldn鈥檛 grow?聽 I wondered if I should bother to buy them.
And then delighted, I paid for the lettuce seeds in cash 鈥� two pieces of silver, a quarter and a dime.聽
