ONIONS AND EVOLUTION

I've been having some rather unexpected success in my latest onion experiment, most of it due to the sudden extreme lack of monkeys for no reason I can think of-- maybe karma applies to hairy red-faced beasts? Maybe there is a just god? You take a guess, I'm busy. Anyway, of my couple dozen experimentally planted onions, all were bulbing, only a few had toppled and only one was about to flower; the others were looking good-- I might actually get to enjoy a full grown onion of my own nurturing!

It was in that general state of mind, onionwise, that on Sunday morning I was on my way to get some new goya plants to replace the now patently inferior ones I'd gotten under the old "a goya is a goya is a goya" fallacy, and was not thinking at all about monkeys (unusual for me) as I neutraled down the hill from the house toward the tunnel, where I saw two adult monkeys (there are always more in hiding) ambling out of the tunnel looking as they always do like they owned the place, scanning here and there the particulars of their realm, as though my garden and its onions were nowhere on the pinpoints of their minds.

Monkeys are terrible liars (lying takes intelligence!) and know nothing of nonchalance. I could see them looking upward out of the corners of their beady eyes and consulting their navigation tools saying Yeah, looks like the onion place, must be just up there, it's called the Brady Place on the map... must be a foreign name... So I speed-reversed the car back to the house a la any old US police procedural, yelled to Echo as I ran out back that there were monkeys on the way! Coming up the hill! (Direction is key) Keep an eye peeled!

Out in the garden, with ruthless tears (I've been burned before by the I'll Let Them Grow Until This Weekend Syndrome), pulled up the onions, put them in a basket and brought them into the house (Do not leave rescued onions on deck!), then took off on the goya mission. Came back later, goyaful, saw no signs of monkey frustration, asked Echo if she'd seen any monkeys, of course she hadn't. She hadn't because they knew-- the simians knew-- they'd seen me running out back, they'd smelled the scent of pulling onions and from their leafy vantages they'd seen the smirk on my face as moments later I whizzed by in pursuit of goya, at which point they said: too late; let's forget the Brady Place, he's been burned too often-- maybe next year -- let's go visit the neighbors' nice dog, he likes monkeys, maybe he has onions, do dogs have onions? He didn't last year, according to the Onion Hunters Guide, but these lesser species do evolve; look how far these humans have come...