An Odd Day

Some days are filled with little oddities. This was one for me.

This morning when I carried some empty canning jars to the basement I noticed again the basket of 18-month-old sweet potatoes waiting to be thrown on the compost pile. I noticed a detail I’d missed before: a couple of these small, ancient tubers had put out sprouts. Since the basket receives little light, the sprouts are pink with maroon leaves.

The sweet potatoes I bought at the grocery store and stuck in water haven’t done diddly-squat, so I brought up one of the ancient sprouted potatoes, laid it in a bowl of water, supported it with pebbles from the Biloxi beach, and set it in the south window. I laid the potato on its side because it has sprouts on both ends and I don't want to sacrifice any sprouts. This is not the traditional way of starting sweet potatoes. Usually they are suspended lengthwise in a jar of water. Mine is an odd experiment.

The next odd thing was the snowstorm. Here it is, the last day of winter, and I was driving to town in what seemed like a blizzard. The sky was white with big clumps of wet snow that melted on the windshield, but blanketed the farm fields in white. It didn’t amount to anything in the end, but snow is forecast for the second and third days of spring, an oddity indeed.

The final oddity is this organic object I found when cleaning out the vegetable drawer of our refrigerator. It's two inches long and weighs practically nothing.

I’ve been gone for two months and have no idea what Dennis put in that drawer. He doesn’t recognize it either. I wish someone would identify it before I throw it in the compost. Don’t you just hate not knowing? It’s the curse of an inquiring mind, another oddity these days.

P.S. The dictionary that is part of my MacBook Pro is far superior to Microsoft Word’s spell checker. Word thinks I spelled “diddly-squat” incorrectly, but my Mac dictionary knows it well. In face it shows three different spellings.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer