Peanuts. They’re delicious. I love peanuts.
A few weeks ago I invited some friends over for a spontaneous campfire around our fire pit.
I put a lot of effort into the party. My beloved wife, Marsha, was out of state visiting family, so all the preparations were up to me.
It took me five minutes to invite everyone. It took me five minutes to drag some folding chairs from the garage to the fire pit.
It took five minutes to get the fire started, five minutes to take it apart and rebuild it properly, and five minutes to go down to the basement to get a cooler, bring it up, and fill it with ice.
And now the hardest part: shopping.
A ten-minute drive to the store, followed by paying with a crate full of bottles of water and two large bags of salted peanuts in the shell.
The party was a success. It was a very pleasant gathering. The weather was perfect and because there was no wind the smoke went straight up.
Peanuts in their shells are messy things to eat in the house, but perfect for a fire pit. Crack them open, eat the nuts, and throw the shells on the fire. Do bits of peanut shell and shells fall to the ground? So what? They’ll blow away eventually.
The only two problems are that we didn’t eat them all. In fact, only half of the first bag disappeared that night, so I had to eat the rest. So far I’ve only eaten a quarter of the first bag. And the second problem is that we got stuck in a heat wave after the party.
I don’t do heat waves. I hate hot weather.
“So what?” you think. “What does that have to do with peanuts?”
Simple. I tried to eat them inside, even though Marsha is home now and catches me doing it.
There are many pieces of peanut to be found.
I try to eat them on the porch, but it’s too hot there.
I still know what you’re thinking.
“Just wait until it cools down. You don’t have to eat all those peanuts right away, do you?”
I can’t help it. I love peanuts, even though in the South they’re called goober peas, a term I don’t find very appealing.
My mother was an excellent and enthusiastic gardener, once serving as an officer in the Michigan Garden Club. She wrote a newspaper column for decades called “The Gardener’s Grapevine.”
At some point she decided to experiment and in addition to her usual flower and vegetable gardens, she planted peanuts and cotton. In Michigan.
She ended up with 7 cotton balls from which she picked many seeds, without a cotton press. She also ended up with 28 small, raw peanuts covered in soil. She carefully cleaned the soil of the pods and then roasted them in her oven. She let me eat a handful of the little things — outside. They were delicious, but could have used a little salt.
Growing peanuts and cotton in Michigan was not a solid commercial enterprise. It would have taken a field full of mother’s little peanuts to fill a small bowl.
Marsha didn’t know I was sitting here writing about peanuts in the shell, so she asked me if she could keep the unopened bag of peanuts in the pantry and just leave the small remaining bag on the counter.
“Of course,” I said. “I know where to find them.”
“I wish you knew where I could find the vacuum cleaner,” she thought to herself.
— Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: Looking Out: Peanuts
