The last of the summer garden consisted of nothing but a few sprouts of pea green arugula, peering up at me from the frozen dirt ground. It seemed to be trying to inform me of something, pleading for me to just rip it from the ground and throw it or bury it or eat it, anything to withdraw it from its lonely position in the out-of season vegetable bed. Only a few green tomatoes surrounded it, grown premature and then perished from the november snow fallen days before.

I find this a bit hard to tell you. The poor, misshapen arugula, surrounded by the graves of the carrots and peppers and zucchini almost convinced me to tear it from the earth’s surface, just in order to extract it from its misery. I then remembered it was just a vegetable.