And besides, they're just leaves. And a little dirt. Tomato leaves and dirt from the tomato patch and two green tomatoes, plus a handful of pokeweed leaves. For a friend. A colleague, actually, a biologist who is studying manganese uptake in tomato and pokeweed plants and needs some samples. Scientific samples is what they are. Perfectly harmless. And legal.
It took us a little while to find suitable pokeweed leaves. We have plenty of pokeweed, which looks quite pretty right now with its festoons of purple berries attracting birds, but the local electric company's scorched-earth weed-eradication program has made large patches of greenery in our area shrivel and die, including everything on the hillside across the road where the trilliums bloom so abundantly in spring.
We finally found some undamaged pokeweed but in the process we also found pawpaws growing like fuzzy green lightbulbs under their canopy of donkey-ear leaves. Plenty of pawpaw trees grow on the edge of our woods, but generally the deer and raccoons get to the fruit before it's ripe enough to pick. Yesterday, though, we found one plump juicy pawpaw with those distinctive yellow speckled spots indicating ripeness and we took it up to the house to save for this morning's breakfast. It was perfect: yellow custardy flesh with a flavor I would describe as bananaesque and mangolicious.
But it's a good thing I didn't get pulled over this morning because no traffic cop would have stood still to listen to this whole unlikely tale, especially with all that plastic taped over my car window. But that's a story for another day.
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