By Jim Hagarty
Have you ever heard of someone buying a rhubarb plant?
I didn’t think so.
Rhubarb owners come by their rhubarb in only one of two ways. They ask someone to share a plant. Or they steal it.
I could have asked my neighbour to share his rhubarb with me. But what fun would that have been?
My neighbour was a young bachelor, renting the house directly behind me. He had a regular rhubarb farm in his backyard.
But this guy, young and interested in all the non-rhubarbian things in life, wouldn’t have known a rhubarb plant from a raspberry vine. Come to think of it, he wouldn’t have known a raspberry vine from a pack of gum. This is not to put him down. At his stage in life, rhubarb, or raspberries, for that matter, were not a priority. Gum, maybe.
I could have walked over to his place any day and asked him if I could uproot three of his many rhubarb plants and transplant them in my yard. He would have said yes. As nice a guy as you could find, he probably would have helped me dig them up.
But I decided on illegal confiscation as the better route. For absolutely no reason I can nail down.
So one day when my neighbour was at work, I wandered over to his place with wheelbarrow and shovel, criminal intentions uppermost in my mind. I carefully opened his gate, which squeaks, afraid to alert the householder who at that moment was many miles away with his job.
The gate co-operated, and I entered contraband territory. It was a beautiful sunny day, no wind, no clouds.
I started digging.
Just then, it seemed to cloud over. And the wind came up. But each time I stopped digging and looked around, the day was as nice as could be.
Back to work, excavating as silently as an earthworm.
Then the shutters on the upper part of the old brick house started banging. I stopped and looked up. The house has no shutters. Back to work. More banging shutters. Clouds. Wind whipping up.
Then a creepy feeling that someone was watching me from a window in the house. I quickly looked around. There was no one. Or was that curtain moving?
A police siren wailed. It was the rhubarb cops. I was afraid of that.
I glanced at the street in front of my neighbour’s house. A cruiser went streaking by. Maybe a bigger catch – a raspberry vine thief on the next block – was the one in trouble.
Stealth rhubarb digging is a terrible job. It takes forever to get those darned things out of the ground. Especially when it was necessary to space out the ones I took so that it would not appear anything was amiss. After a plant was removed, the big broad leaves on all the other plants had to be fluffed up to disguise their missing neighbour.
I don’t know if rhubarb plants have feelings, but suddenly, I felt like a kidnapper.
The job ended finally, amidst much terror at the clouds and the wind and the flapping shutters and the fear that my neighbour would come home unexpectedly.
I thought of all this tonight as I was in my backyard admiring our rhubarb plants. They are doing very well. My neighbour moved out of his house, none the wiser. Or grief-stricken at the loss of his rhubarb, who can tell?
Another thought occurred to me tonight.
I hate rhubarb. I always have.
