A FAREWELL TO ONIONS

It's not easy saying goodbye to our little green friends that stand so tall and taste so good and bring nourishment, are fun to watch grow spiky and strong from little seeds fed on sunshine and rain-- like our very own children in a way, though much quieter and requiring no education or frequent new wardrobes since they already know all they have to know and a lot more besides, wear no shoes and for even the most formal occasion require no more clothing than their birthday suits.

But the one thing they don't know is the reason onions and I have to go our separate ways: unlike other plants I could name, onions do not yet know how to make monkeys dislike them. And even if they did, we humans, being more akin to monkeys than we like to admit, would then also dislike onions, so this is clearly a no-win situation vis-a-vis yours truly and our pungent little friends with infinite hearts.

I only planted a few onion sets this year. I've been planting fewer and fewer onions each year since monkeys and I first became neighbors, thinking that perhaps I might reach a point at which the red-faced thieves wouldn't find so few onions worth the bother; but as life taught me this morning-- a bit of useful knowledge I now pass on to you-- it only takes one monkey to ravage onions. (If you don't think a couple dozen onions can be ravaged, stop by later this afternoon.)

I could plant and harvest a thousand onions if I wanted to spend major yen to put up an electric fence and pay endless power bills as many have done around here, since the oh-so-cute and spoiled-rotten simians have mobs of animal-loving friends in the cities who never see monkeys except in zoos and fawny photographs or doing cute things on tv (Japanese monkeys are simply unbeatable at PR), but my overall aim in life is to simplify, so goodbye my loyal globular friends, that always bring tears to my eyes...