Elliot became a teacher on Sunday afternoon, and I was his somewhat reluctant student. It was hands-on learning that involved a mud puddle, a garden infested with nasty weeds and Neapolitan ice cream heavy on the chocolate.
I learned the sky is green, the grass is blue, the correct way to spell his name doesn't involve vowels and he can run through a mud puddle without getting dirty.
The spelling lesson was followed by an exercise involving filling a sandbox pail with gems rescued from the gravel's grayness. A softball throw and batting session ended when the ball was lost in the tall grass. His winded student insisted it was break time, but Elliot wanted to see the potato he had planted more than a month ago.
He reached the garden before I did and held up the top half of what once had been a blossoming tomato plant.
"Is this a nasty weed?"
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I needed the extra credit.
"That's a Nebuchadnezzar weed.'' I said in a bluff to convince him he had done good and not bad.
Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar doesn't have a weed named after him. It says of him in the book of Daniel that "he was driven away from people and ate grass like the ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird.''
A less poetic writer would say the bad king had gone insane.
If Elliot had been a teacher 200 years ago in Europe he would be right about the tomato plant. That's because well-educated and upper crust Europeans called tomatoes "poison apples'' because people who ate them during lavish garden parties became ill and some suffered gruesome deaths. The fruit was served on fancy, but lead-laden pewter plates. Tomatoes' natural acidity caused the lead to leach into the fruit. It wasn't until poor Italians developed a taste for pizza in the 1880s that tomatoes lost the label.
Some plants — many of them imported from distant lands and originally intended for garden use — are indeed poisonous. Wild parsnips can cause severe burns, and omnipresent rhubarb leaves can sicken. The state ag department recently issued an alert about Grecian foxglove, a European invader that's been found in Wabasha, Washington and Dakota counties. It looks a little like lettuce and can kill humans and livestock.
Outside of a squashed summer squash, our weeding went on without further incident. After the ice cream reward, both of us earned a nap.
Ma and Dad used the free time to pay a visit.
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I knew Ma wanted to pick strawberries because she wore the sun hat and ragged apron reserved for outside use. She was upset because the chickens had stolen many berries and made a mess with their constant scratching and dusting. She had pestered Dad to build a fence, but it would have to wait until corn cultivating was finished.
Ma was happy for the help, even if it was reluctantly given on a hot and humid day when mosquitoes were thick as fleas on a homeless dog.
The promised reward would be short cake drenched in sweetness.
Dad quickly intervened and was in no mood to bargain. He had spent the morning sharpening the knives used to cut weeds from the grain field. The work easily could be saved for a better day, but he seemed irrational when it came to weeds.
The chore wasn't really about the weeds — it was nothing less than corporal punishment for a mistake I made on July 4th. I hadn't known that a cherry bomb thrown into a stock tank would rip it apart.
Elliot wanted more Neapolitan and then more gardening.
"The plants need a nap,'' I said.
I couldn't move because I was as tired as the boy had been after spending an endless afternoon cutting weeds from the wheat field.
