Cabbage baptism

Yesterday, I went to help my father pick cabbage that he planted himself. Firstly, my affinity for manual labour is nonexistent. In fact, I consider my only useful limbs to be my fingers since they type (and they do that so well).

We got to the field where the cabbage is planted around 4PM - the sun was orange and hot in the sky and the field looked beautiful with huge cabbage leaves sticking out of the soil in endless rows that went on and on. I have no idea how you actually determine whether a cabbage is ready to be picked but my father went around looking at the heads, cutting at them with his machete when he deemed them ripe (do cabbages get ripe?) and then throwing them at me to stack into boxes.

The beauty of this was that I didn't feel too incompetent because cabbages are big enough that you can't easily drop them when they're thrown at you and, even better, their large leaves act as dams for rain water. As the cabbages made contact with my hands, the water inside the leaves would splash onto me. Probably not the cleanliest water, but as the liquid doused my forearms and neck I felt oddly reshaped. Maybe it's because I was catching cabbages, something I never thought I would be doing or maybe it was because mentally I've been trying this new thing where I see the glass half overflowing or whatever but it was a peaceful experience. The sun was warm, the cabbage leaves were billowing and green, speckled with white and I was soaked by the end of the expedition in cabbage water.

Halfway through, my dad and I went to a mango tree across the way and picked a few. We sat down and sucked on mangoes and he genuinely laughed when I described my views on the cabbage-water baptism and it felt like we shared a nice moment. In all, we picked a whopping seven hundred and ninety pounds of cabbage.

Can we please stop and reflect on this for a moment? SEVEN HUNDRED AND NINETY POUNDS. I tried to keep count but got lost along the way but we picked roughly 600 cabbages. It was long, tiring and I can't believe I felt so cleansed by cabbage-picking. I even had enough energy to go run for an hour and a half after which seemed miraculous.

So if anyone out there has the chance to get a cabbage baptism, I definitely recommend it. It was enlightening... or just fun.