The Story of the Beautiful Carrots

My mother-in-law grows a garden each summer.  In it are vegetables, like delicious cucumbers and crisp, sweet carrots, and cutting flowers that she picks and arranges to take to people to brighten their day.  After learning about our carrot harvest disaster of 2009, this year she decided to plant extra carrots for our family and for Dot as well.  The carrots grew and grew.  My mother-in-law is very good at growing carrots.  The problem is that she is also a very busy lady, traveling all over the place, and the carrots just didn’t get harvested.  One of her secrets of growing sweet carrots is to leave the carrots in the ground after the first light frost, which brings out their flavor.  She had to do more traveling, and then it snowed.  Knowing the snow was coming, she covered the ground over the carrots with straw to insulate them.  The snow covered all the straw.

We were sitting in my mother-in-law’s living room, relaxing in big puffy sofas that you just sink into and never really want to get up from again.  The sun was bright and shining in the windows.  It was cozy.  The babies were sleeping.  The big kids were playing.  The grown ups were chatting.

My mother-in-law sheepishly mentioned that she has carrots!  Carrots for all of us!  The carrots just happened to still be in the ground.  Under the snow.  Would we like to go dig them up?  We looked at each other.  We looked at the snow.  We looked at each other.  We raised our eyebrows.  Carrots!  Tasty carrots!  She just didn’t quite get time to get out and dig them out yet.  But we could!  They were beautiful, beautiful carrots!

And then I burst out laughing in a fit of giggles unlike any I’d had for months and months.  My mother-in-law is just a hoot!  Sure enough, my wonderful husband rallied and convinced Dot’s husband Don to go outside and find some shovels, and they dug up the snow and the straw and found the carrots. Lots of carrots.  There were two very large tubs of carrots, and we spent the morning sorting carrots, cutting the mushy green top leaves off of carrots, scraping the extremely cold (but not quite frozen) black mud off carrots, and then packing the carrots into tubs of sand. There was even an extra trip into town to procure more sand for the carrots (who knew there were so many?)  It was quite the family affair.  There were long carrots, fat carrots, tiny carrots, globs of carrots, and even two sets of carrots that grew like a pair of legs wearing pants.

We brought a bunch of carrots home.  They are truly delicious.  Mr. Sneaky Pants gleefully devoured the pair of pants carrots.