My husband goes for walks with camera in hand and shows me things he has seen. Sometimes he sends the photos to me, especially when I ask for one in particular. So, going through my old photos, I came across some winter photos of someone's little back yard garden area. It had temporary fencing, a drift of leaves in snow-capped piles, some scrounged looking items, and just a general look of comfortable know-how. I was very impressed and thought to myself, "I really want to meet these people!"

So I asked my husband where the photo was taken. Did he talk with the neighbors? Could he find it again? He couldn't remember.

A couple weeks later, it dawned on me that these photos were my own son's garden in another city and which I had seen only a couple of times. My son had sent me the photos. That was a very pleasant dawning. I'm a happy mom.

So I chatted with my son over the weekend and he had harvested his second round of cabbages, 120 pounds, with another 120 pounds or so left in the garden. These were not from his back yard but from a garden he and his wife had put in at his grandfather-in-law's home. It will all get turned into sauerkraut. He really does eat a LOT of sauerkraut. He says, "Cabbage is not a vegetable; it is meat." I guess he really tastes that umami element.

As child, my son helped me in the garden. In fact, his first independent garden project was to bust out a thick concrete pad that had once hosted a stone barbecue pit, haul buckets of river mud to fill in the empty spot left after the concrete removal, plant cabbage from seed, harvest, ferment, and can sauerkraut. He was 14....The evidence today is that the lesson stuck; the baptism took.