Communing With the Onions

Yesterday we went for our half-marathon walk. Yes, I am still in training, and I'm proud to say that I did the scheduled 13.59 miles yesterday morning. It took just over 4 hours, which is okay for being only about four weeks into this venture. Next week's long walk--as prescribed by Husband's marathon training book--is a mere 7 miles. I won't know what to do with that! It will seem like a walk in the park!

But I digress. The delight was that I got to commune with the onions yesterday.

Onions actually have special significance in my family. When I was growing up my mom would go to the hairdresser every Friday and have her fine, straight hair set on rollers so it looked good for the weekend. She often commented on how my dad's hair was full of thick natural curls, and that I had inherited that. "Well, you just have to eat onions," my dad would say. "They make your hair curly."
So yesterday we were walking along Mission Road with five kilometers left to go (out of 21.8 total; we're people of the metric system) when we came to a field nearly ready for the onion harvest. Our valley is known for sweet onions so good that you can almost eat them raw, so I strayed off the road and swooped into the onion field for my moment of establishing an acquaintance with the local color.

It smelled like onion rings ... and I love onion rings! The plants were in beautiful shape. It had not really sunk in before now that the onions grow practically right on top of the ground. You can walk into someone's field and just pick them up off the dirt.

One of the prettiest sights of the morning walk, in my opinion, were the onion flowers lifting up like little snowballs all over the field.

Beauty can be found just anywhere, can't it? Even by weary walkers surveying a big old onion field on a sunny Sunday morning in June.

And yes, somewhere deep down, I still believe that onions make my hair curly.