Spear by spear

No one would ever call me an optimist. I can find the down side to ANYTHING. But growing asparagus can make even me believe in the impossible.

Just like the experts advise, for two weeks we snapped off every single sign of life from the plants and gobbled them up, and when only a few teeny-weeny scraggly stragglers were coming up, we declared the harvest over.

Pessimism strikes. Surely we'd killed the plants, sapped them of all their energy, and the scraggly bits were going to shrivel and die, and the roots that hadn't sent up any final stragglers were already dead. It was absolutely impossible that they'd survived.

Asparagus, however, has more faith in itself than I do. New spears emerged from every single plant, even the one we didn't know existed, buried at the far end under mounds of weeds.

Spear by spear, I'm recovering a sense of optimism.