1. It seemed like every Christmas for my entire childhood, and beyond, my dad would give me a card that said "happy hollandaise!" He must have bought the lot of those cards and my brother and I came to expect, and even look forward to, them every year. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate an actual card for this post and I can't quite remember now if it was a photograph or an illustration but you can imagine...
2. The whole way asparagus makes your pee smell is crazy. Even if you eat the tiniest bit.
3. And most importantly, asparagus announces spring and makes me think of my grandfather. We moved to Beacon because we wanted to have chickens and a vegetable garden, though I had no real experience with either. I would have never thought to plant asparagus because it seems so exotic but ,after we arrived here, my grandfather (who, as far as I knew, had never touched dirt) told me about his childhood in New Jersey, and how they had a patch of asparagus growing in their front yard that he would pick from, liberally, every spring. Only a couple of years after we moved back east, my grandfather passed away and I, sort of unofficially, named our garden after him. Only a few people know it as the Clarence Arthur Heuer Memorial Garden but that's what it is to me and I cherish the opportunity each year to begin planting and using the time working the soil to think about my grandparents and conjure up their voices in my head. Now that I have known the frustrating failures of gardening, I really appreciate anything perennial. The asparagus comes up like magic every year, just before the weather seems friendly enough for anything to grow. Delicious aliens arriving in our front yard.
