We received word one day that Matt Christson's family had been forcibly taken from their land; it had been sold by the IRS because the Christsons didn't believe in paying taxes to Caesar. Don and Helen had been arrested, leaving Matt and Lee to fend for themselves at a local campground. They were both adults or nearly so, but the news left us shaken and sympathetic even though we didn't hang out with the Christsons much anymore. I wasn't sure why; it was something about the women not knowing their place in the family and them being respectful to Dad, who was a man. Everyone knew it was wrong for a woman to be disrespectful to a man. Still, we worried about the family.

We were busy struggling to survive ourselves, though. Once more out of work, Dad and Mom joined the Gleaners, a group that collected food from stores that would have been thrown away otherwise. Then Dad became active with the food bank, and was soon bring a lot more than our family needed home, and giving it to anyone we knew was hungry or could use more food. Some of it, like the cottage cheese, wouldn't keep very long. Mom tried draining it with cheesecloth and drying it in the bathroom to preserve it. This sort of grossed me out, what with the pot reeking day in and day out in the same air the cheese was hanging in. We had plenty of day old bread, and often the stale bread that was dry or beginning to mold went to the chickens, along with any food scraps.

It was my job to feed the chickens. They also got a coffee can full of corn every day. When I fed them the corn, I noticed that every once in a while, one of the corn kernels would be whole, not cracked. Occasionally, one of the whole kernels would be striped with red. Sometimes the kernel was almost all red. I found this interesting and exciting, because I liked unusual vegetables and especially unusually colored vegetables. Red corn would be pretty interesting, if I could breed for corn that had only red kernels! I began sifting through the corn before I fed it and saving out all the red kernels to plant next year. I had seen Hopi Blue flour corn in the Gurney's seed catalog, but never red corn. Maybe I would have something new on my hands!

I did the same thing with any vegetable or fruit that entered our house. I would hover around when they were being cut into and get the seeds, lay them out on paper towels or newspaper, and carefully label the paper. When the seeds were dry, I folded the paper up and saved it. I quickly found that citrus seeds pretty much had to be used fresh. They didn't grow well once they'd been dried. There was so much to learn about these things; I was frustrated at times by not being able to access more information.

My first radishes were ready, their red stems swelling just below the soil line into the characteristic radish shape that I'd waited for over a month to see. It was time to pick them, but the thought of pulling my beloved plants up out of the ground seemed wrong. Who was I to choose for a plant to die so I could eat it? It seemed so cruel! I almost cried as I pulled it out of the ground. At least with the pea plants, I wouldn't have to sacrifice the entire plant to eat it. The vegetable plants were beautiful, and I couldn't understand why none of the books or articles I'd read had ever mentioned this. Many of the seed catalogs didn't even show what the actual plant would look like, or how big it would be, only the vegetable itself, looking pretty much as it would in a grocery store. As far as I was concerned, my food plants were just as pretty as any silly, frivolous flower. I felt like they were really underrated in terms of aesthetics.