Pick Ye Peppers

We're hard-wired to catch animals, no doubt. But yesterday I wondered if there isn't a genetically programmed drive to get the crops in while you can as well. Weather.com said there was a frost advisory, and I had a number of green peppers still on the plants. They weren't very big, but they were big enough that I didn't want them to get nipped by frost and be wrinkly and funky and no good. I went for a walk in the park, thinking about this, and as I walked the day went from late-summer balmy to cold and blustery. A wind came up, and I saw towers of dark clouds reaching up into the sky, and I realized that the wind was coming out of the north.

Now, no magical thinking, but it was like something inside me spoke, a voice from thousands of years ago, from the dawn of agriculture, and it was like a warning inside me. Dude, it said, pick the peppers already, willya? Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, the poet said, and if he didn't also say to pick your peppers while you can I think it's strongly implied. So I picked the peppers, put them in a bag and took them home. They're in the kitchen now. Later on a few of them (they're small) will be in me.