Lunch.

Nausea levels have been high and food correspondingly fraught. But! We have entered into that beautiful part of the year, and that is the part where markgritter's garden makes decisions for me.

Today, for example, I peeled two tiny cucumbers--one of them barely bigger than my thumb--and washed lo these many tiny currant tomatoes, and I put a little Asiago Caesar dressing on that, and I ate it, and it was good. And while I was eating that, I had in the oven two halves of a little slender eggplant, face down, rubbed with just enough olive oil to make them not stick to the pan, and they got a little crispy along the edges, and I put lemon juice on them and that was it, just lemon juice, and oh, they were perfect, soft in the middle and crispy along the edges. And then I thought about it and decided that this was a lovely lunch except for the protein, so I had some hazelnuts and some milk. And then I thought as how maybe one of the little dark-chocolate sea-salt caramels markgritter got me for my birthday might do, and so I ate that. And that was lunch.

There are a great many things in this world more complicated. But this one was extremely fine, and I thought I'd say. And people maybe sometimes think that eating more vegetables is complicated even if they have the kitchens and the time, and it isn't. It isn't complicated at all. You wash the eggplant, you whack it in half, you stick it in the oven with a little olive oil, you pull it out again and there is lemon juice, and there doesn't even really have to be lemon juice. But there could have been basil. Or there could have been oregano. Or there could have been rosemary. Or salt. Or fine-chopped tomatoes with all of these things. But there didn't have to be. Just lemon juice would do.

So little depends on the damn red wheelbarrow, but it's an awfully fine red wheelbarrow anyway, is the thing.