Meet the mighty lettuce deity, de Jesus (pronounced day hay Zeus). Does the jaundiced skin frighten you? The vampire teeth? The eery clang of the Dinty Moore tins hanging from his armpits? De Jesus stands guard over my lettuce to protect it from the free-living counterculturists who have taken to constructing their below-ground condominiums in the vicinity of my vegetable patch. Which brings me to one of the great conundrums of contemporary life: Much ballyhooed for his reasoning faculties, the industrially sustained suburbanite with his mortgage payments and his endless culinary options places himself increasingly at the mercy of the dialysis machine and the cholesterol-lowering pill, while the blubbery groundhog has no need of a doctor at all. And talk about your elevated tastebuds: Even before the advent of our degustation menu, Mr. Groundhog was into a little-bit-of-this and a little-bit-of-that, nibbling at the blanched heart of frisee (just enough to make the whole head unsalable), then moving onto radicchio, peas, strawberries.
“Here me, ye beasts of the field,” de Jesus barks as all around him pie tins flash and clang in the wind. “All who enter upon this patch of lettuce and partake of the vegetative matter therein shall forthwith be skinned, quartered, and divvied up into Dinty Moore cans.” You’d think that would be enough to convince a creature whose reasoning faculties are presumed to be low enough for superstition to gain the upper hand. “I’ll take the Golden Arches over de Jesus any day,” ought to be the last I ever hear from Mr. Groundhog before he scurries off to submit his arteries to whatever gunk agro-industrialists insist on stuffing into them. “So much medieval malarkey,” shrugs Mr. Groundhog. Note the double fence, a layer of chicken wire over a layer of poly mesh. And the protective fabric covering the lettuce. He still finds a way in, the unbridled sybarite, pontiff of the pea, bane of my existence. Next year, I’ll try Marduk, the fire-breathing bar-be-cuer of lettuce-straying rodents. Or Dinty Moore himself. Alas, I’m the superstitious one. Thanks to Eric de Jesus of Gen X farm supply for the new wave scarecrow.
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