RIVER CITY JOURNAL: AN AGING FARMBOY GOES GRAZING IN THE YARD

Recently some friends invited you over for hamburgers cooked on an outdoor grill. This may not sound like a big deal, but for the past nine months you have been living in an apartment that has no space for an outdoor grill.

There is an indoor grill, a very fancy built-in one. It works too, but in spite of your best efforts it makes a lot of smoke. And, unlike the outdoor grill you are used to, the indoor grill, being a rather prominent feature in the kitchen, has to be thoroughly cleaned.

Some folks fastidiously clean their outdoor grills too. You have watched them, and you have tried, sometimes with success, to convince them that the residue on a well-used grill is what gives charbroiled meat its flavor. Besides, you argue, the heat of the grill is sufficient to slay any bugs or germs. This logic worked for years when your outdoor grill was pressed into service almost every night. Year around.

It has long been a Christmas tradition in your family, for example, to grill steaks on the outdoor grill on Christmas Eve. Sometimes this has presented some interesting problems. Like the year you were living in the far northwestern reaches of Missouri and it got so cold the gas controls on the grill froze. So there you were with a hair dryer trying to thaw the grill so you could stand in the 20-below-zero temperatures and grill steaks. But that's tradition for you.

While waiting for the charcoal to heat (these friends are purists when it comes to grilling), you were given a tour of the spring flowers and shrubs in the yard. Since your friends only recently moved into the house, there were plenty of surprises for everyone.

As your wife caressed every blooming plant, you noticed there were quite a few less desirable plants too. You may call them weeds. But what you noticed were called greens when you were growing up.

This time of year would be about the peak of greens season. Everybody would grab a paper grocery sack and head up the road to pick greens. Sometimes you had to ask an adult what was good and what wasn't. Actually, to a child none of it was good in the sense you looked forward to eating it. The greens would be cooked with some bacon grease and seasoned with a dollop of vinegar at the table. You reckon it would have taken a railroad-carload of ketchup to make the greens edible to an 8-year-old.

Nowadays, greens sound good. It is probably the nostalgia factor. Haven't you noticed how things that you never liked when you were growing up taste so good as an adult? You attribute that to the warm, fuzzy feelings you keep forever about childhood. Besides, Mother's cooking is always a treat, right?

So as everyone else studied iris and honeysuckle and peonies and the violets that had taken over your friends' yard, you picked the top out of some lamb's-quarter. You offered it to your hostess who didn't seem at all thrilled. City girl, you thought.

Then you spotted some sheep sorrel. As you munched a few leaflets you got the satisfying sour flavor that you remembered from your youth. "Look, he's eating the yard again," someone said.

Finally the hamburgers were sizzling on the grill, which was next to what used to be a tended bed of some sort, perhaps a flower bed. But among the foliage, mostly dandelion now, you spotted a familiar stalk of leaves. You pinched off a leaf and crushed in your fingers. Sure enough. Mint. "Look," you said, "just what you need for mint juleps."

"Yeah, right," your host snorted. It was clear he didn't intend to start grazing either. He ought to know better. He's from Arkansas.

If any of you are inspired to go looking for greens, take heed: When you were growing up pesticides and herbicides weren't common. Nowadays, most fields, yards and roadsides are sprayed with something. Be careful you gather greens only where it is safe -- probably on the other side of the fence.

But you might not want to let your city friends see what your are up to.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.