Oh man. Groceries are just too expensive here. A quick trip to the market and before you know it, your cart barely has anything but costs over a hundred bucks. I live in the Gyeonggi area. There’s a little garden in front of my house, and if you plant a few things there, you can live pretty well. Plus, it’s all organic. I only use compost. There’s this organic market called ‘Saenong’, and a single radish there costs five thousand won. But me? A while back, I picked about five radishes from my garden without spending a dime. If you wrap them up in plastic like this, they’ll last a long time.
And with that, the driver pulls out a radish wrapped in plastic from the corner of the driver’s seat to show me. Looking at that radish, my mind was racing.
‘Is this person a woman? Or a man?’
The neatly trimmed and slicked-back hair definitely screamed male, but the voice sounded kind of like an auntie. (Of course, it could be a guy with a voice disorder.) The driving was so rough that I clung to the passenger side handle, making them seem like a macho man, yet the endless chatter had this strangely feminine vibe, leaving me completely puzzled.
These days, our country’s climate has totally changed. You can really feel it when you’re growing veggies. I grow cabbage too, and there are varieties like the 60-day cabbage and the 90-day cabbage. That number shows how long it takes for the cabbage to grow enough to eat. Personally, I love the 90-day cabbage. It’s tastier. Maybe it’s because it stays rooted in the ground a bit longer, but who knows. Anyway, you have to put more love into the 90-day cabbage than the 60-day one. Growing cabbage isn’t easy; you have to keep catching cabbage worms with chopsticks and all that. Doing that for an extra 30 days is something else. But with the weather being so hot, the cabbages ripen too quickly. Nowadays, after just 30 days, the leaves are already the size of a hand.
By now, I wasn’t curious about their gender anymore and found myself getting lost in the cabbage tale.
‘Oh, really? So, for the 60-day cabbage, is it a different seed altogether? Or does the farmer just harvest it early to make it a 60-day cabbage?’
‘We’re here, customer.’
..
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It felt like being interrupted in the middle of something important. (Sorry 😅)
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