The Myth of Wile E

Take Your Flying Squirrels to Work Day

This is what I'd learned about pawpaw trees. There's a reason they weren't found in a guide to local flora at the library. Come to find out, the pawpaw was a little out of its element; like me, it came from Kentucky or thereabouts. Maybe Indiana, or Ohio. Someone must have brought it here, once upon a time. Or maybe a seed got eaten by a possum that got eaten by a raptor that was on its way from Kentucky to wherever raptors went.

I'd also learned that pawpaw leaves were the source of food for the zebra swallowtail butterfly. Pawpaw leaves were to zebra swallowtails what bamboo was to pandas, what eucalyptus leaves were to koala bears, what hot dogs were to Gladys's kids. Which is to say, the only thing they ever ate, and if you took it away, then they (zebra swallowtails/pandas/koalas/my nephews) would probably go extinct.

By late summer the pawpaws had started to ripen, and I ate luscious custardy pawpaw fruits for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and what I didn't eat, I piled onto the farm stand. That was exactly what I was doing-arranging an armload of pawpaws on the table-when a sheriff's deputy pulled up. I wondered if he'd gotten hungry on a stake-out and was exploring healthy alternatives to fast food.

The deputy got out, scanned all around as if he'd never been outside his car before, nodded, and said, "Mawnin'."

I smiled and agreed that it was (morning).

"See ya gotcherself a farm stand? 'Waahhhld foods.' Thatsa new 'un." He drawled heavily, which was really a matter of choice in these parts. It's not like back in Kentucky where most folks from the mountains (like Gran-pappy and Maw-maw, who I'd met on the phone, and Daddy's cousin Gus, who came to Hollywood once) just naturally talked that way, their vowels rising and falling like the rolling hills. Here, it either meant you were from someplace further south, or you sort of did it on purpose because you wanted folks to know you were a good ol' boy. I asked the deputy if he was from the area originally.

"Heresburg bawn-n-raised," he said.

"World's best ground-cherry pie?" I offered.

"Bes' bo-lieve it." He stuck his thumbs in his belt loops, rocked on his feet, and slowly examined the items on the table, occasionally shaking his head and saying waahld foods, with this amused, dubious tone as if he were saying, taahm mushine.

I described our current offerings. "Our" meaning "me and the coffee can," I guess. While the flying squirrels enjoyed hanging out at the farm stand for Take Your Flying Squirrels to Work Day, they'd shown no real interest in going into any particular line of work. The lazy squirrels were at that moment asleep in the bottom of my shirt pocket-this warm, barely-there weight over my heart.

Besides zucchini, mostly what we had at the farm stand were Every Flavor Beans. I'd managed to sprout them from a mangled bag of "12-bean soup mix" that $hop$mart had thrown in the dumpster for being past its expiration date. When I'd found the bag it had been the middle of winter and I was fiercely hungry, having run out of everything except sprouty potatoes and shrunken apples. It was all I could do not to make a huge pot of that soup immediately, boiling it up in a big pot on my wood-burning stove. But, I'd figured: Make 12-bean soup and eat for a day; plant the beans in spring and-if they grew-you ate for a lifetime.

Well, they grew; boy howdy they grew. Some wanted to grow on poles, and some wanted to grow as bushes, and some didn't know what they wanted but kind of rambled around like they were "finding themselves." They were black, brown, red, pink, white, and pinto. They were lentils, black-eyed peas, limas, and garbanzo beans (which sounded like something you'd say jumping out of a plane: gar-BANZ-o!). And some were not even beans at all, but turned out to be English peas. Those weren't so thrilled about being born in the summer, but they grew anyway, if a bit brown and straggly.