![]() ![]() Yet there is a way to safely uproot a mandrake-safely, that is, if you aren’t a dog with a bastard of an owner. Dare pull it the from the earth and it lets out a monstrous scream, bestowing agony and death to all those within earshot. It’s said to spring from the dripping fat and blood and semen of a hanged man. Its roots can look bizarrely like a human body, and legend holds that it can even come in male and female form. I realize now that I had been quite lucky in my tanglings with zucchini, for in the Mediterranean there grows a far more murderous plant called the mandrake. ![]() They grew so large and numerous that I eventually had to leave home-mostly because I went to college, but the zucchini certainly didn’t help. My mother grew the scoundrels in the backyard, and whether she was deliberately scheming to improve her yields, or the climate just happened to have been ideal those years, season after season they got bigger and bigger. As a child, no villain was to me more savage than the zucchini. ![]()
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