Burp

Ah, summer.

I straightened my spine and took a good, long look at the garden. For now, it appeared to be an empty patch of brown dirt, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before the miracle beneath the soil took place. Then there would be more green than we had wished for, and we all knew what that meant: the detestable chore of weeding. But today there was no weeding to do. Instead, it was time for my favorite garden job: planting.

Dad had assigned me, as usual, to plant the cucumbers. Which was probably a mistake. I was the only one in my family who particularly liked cucumbers. My older brother and my dad tolerated them, while Mom didn’t like them at all. And me? I loved them. Cucumbers were like heaven in a vegetable, the glory of summer, the king of the garden, the purest form of food… you get the idea. Already, I couldn’t wait until I could sink my teeth into a refreshing bite of summer! Salads, pickles, tacos, rainbow pasta salad, cucumber water: all the good stuff involved my favorite vegetable. And yet, there was nothing quite like eating them raw either; not even bothering to cut them up, but gobbling them down whole as others would consume carrots or bananas.

So why was it a mistake to let me plant the cucumbers? Because, well, maybe I was prone to get a little carried away.

What did that package say? Space twelve inches apart? Baloney! Whoever wrote that obviously knew nothing about cucumbers, nothing at all! I scoffed. If I were to space the seeds that far apart, we would hardly fit any plants in at all! Clearly four or five inches was more reasonable…

“Dad, we need another row of cucumbers!” so he let me get the hoe and add a fourth row.

When I was done planting the cucumbers, I stood up and admired my work. My hands were caked in brown mud, and my back ached from bending over, but it felt good, especially since I had created four long mounds of dirt, which concealed seed after seed of delicious, juicy, mouth-watering cucumbers.

Of course, they didn’t remain lumps of soil for long. Before I knew it, there were little green babies popping up in rows everywhere in the garden. Which of course meant that there were also plenty of green plants we didn’t want. It was weeding season. This was when Dad would spend entire afternoons hunched over in the garden. This was when Mom would start complaining, and asking Dad why he always had to plant such a large garden. This was when me and my brother would drag ourselves out to the yard and half-heartedly pull the imposters out.

This always resulted in some sort of outrageous argument over whether the amount of weeding we each had to do was determined by the row or by the amount of time one worked. I was a faster weeder than my brother, and got more rows done than him, but he always did a more thorough job, and was still out in the garden long after I was done. Obviously, the amount of chore should be determined by the row. It wasn’t my fault that my brother was a slow poke.

For a week or two, we all pitched in to weed the garden. But everyone knew what would happen, because it happened every year. After a couple of weeks, we all got lazy, and nothing more was said about weeding. And so, the garden grew wild, as it had the year before that, and the year before that, and every year I could remember.

This was when the results of my cucumber planting began to show themselves. They stared as rows of little baby plants, but they grew more and more until I found myself staring at what could only be described as a jungle. There were too many plants to count, and they were packed so close together that it was impossible to tell where one started and where the other began. The thick vines were going everywhere in the garden, extending outside of the cucumber area and into the tomatoes and peas on either side.

Mom took one look at it and firmly declared that there were too many. Dad sympathized with me a little, since he had the same problem, only with tomatoes. Every year, Dad planted at least fifteen different types of tomatoes, and every summer the garden produced far more than the four of us could ever eat. But this summer would not be famous for tomatoes. Instead, it was famous for cucumbers. Or, more accurately, infamous.

When July came around on the calendar, it was harvest time. At first, I enjoyed eating cucumbers every day. I loved being able to go out into the garden and grab one whenever I pleased.

But as the days went by, the garden produced more cucumbers, and didn’t stop. Mom ran out of ways to incorporate cucumbers into our meals. My brother refused to eat even another bite of one. Even I had to admit that maybe Mom was right. Maybe there were too many cucumbers.

Out in the garden, the vines were so thick, it required a certain amount of skill to navigate between the rows, but you couldn’t really tell where the rows were anymore. Finding a cucumber was no problem, however. They were everywhere, and every day a new one would appear, as if by magic; so huge I wondered how I could have possibly missed it the day before.

They weren’t really cucumbers anymore. They were more like monster cucumbers: as thick as my leg and at least a foot long each. Besides, there were so many of them, and four or five fresh monsters were discovered each trip to the garden.

Then one day, Dad discovered something. He was watering his precious tomatoes when a vegetable that was definitely not a tomato met his eyes. It was a cucumber. The biggest cucumber in the history of our garden.

I mean this thing was huge! It was the king of the cucumbers. It was hanging down on a thin vine that had somehow grown over one of the tomato cages without us noticing. It must have been at least six inches in diameter, and over a foot long. The vegetable was so enormous that it looked like it would topple the entire cage and bring down the whole tomato plant any minute.

We had invented a sure way of getting rid of cucumbers that were too big to eat: throw them over the fence into the empty field next to the house. But Dad and I agreed that the King of the cucumbers was too good to throw out, and so it stayed where it was, and we watched eagerly to see how big it would get.

That summer was the Cucumber Summer, and the King of the cucumbers ruled the jungle of a garden valiantly until the leaves began to change into the colors of autumn, and the garden once again became a pile of dirt. Needless to say, the next summer I didn’t plant so many cucumbers.

But still, to me, the taste of summer will always be a fresh, succulent bite of cucumber, still warm from the summer sunshine.