Elizabeth Hazen

Here’s Looking At You

Mid-March. Time to go through last fall’s potatoes in their neat rows of bushel baskets on the cellar floor. Rub off the sprouting eyes. Save what can be saved. Most of the potatoes will be wrinkly and soft by now, especially the one-inch diameter tagalongs we harvested for soups and stews. Those little ones have a way of escaping the earlier sortings. One escaped.

I reach the bottom of the stairs and turn back toward the grimy slit of cellar window. Spring. The sun. The . . .

Something, beginning in the darkness behind the freezer, has come out into the murk of the underground room. Thinner than a pencil, a pale self-supporting filament stands in graceful undulations fifteen feet long. Its advancing end, equipped with a bud of miniature waxy leaves, is poised five feet above the floor, angled toward the dusty window.

March sun
at the cellar window
a potato’s eye