Lemon cucumber

The lemon cucumber is a fruit that could never have triggered Adam and Eve's eviction from Eden; it is humble, generous, rough, and pure.

I cannot tell you how many years it's been since I bit into one of these things. Shaped like a BuzzBall, with thin skin like hard plastic to the touch, punctuated by spiked little bumps like a leg not quite recently shaved. There's a naked truth to them; that summer feeling in the space of a bite, a chew, a swallow, four more, and it's gone.

Lemon is only a descriptive modifier on the fruit's firmly cucumberic nature. Botanists believe cucumbers came to the world from India and, pre-cultivation, proliferated in all manner of shapes, outer textures, and colors — it's an ancient fruit.

The Laidback Gardener offers a full history of the cucumber for the interested, as well as this insight: "Its lack of bitterness and ease of digestion are due to it being low in cucurbitacin. If you don't usually like cucumbers, bite into a 'Lemon' cucumber. It's like a very mild, very sweet cucumber; a taste most people appreciate."

It's such a humble fruit — not popular, not great for any purpose your garden-variety cucumber might serve — but it's a loyal snack.

Imagine a bushel of lemon cucumbers. Somewhere between a snowball and a water balloon (cucumbers, lemon notwithstanding, are generally 96% water), a pile of them. It's mid-July. Your apartment is full of lemon cucumbers — you can barely move for the things; they're under your couch and in-between the cushions and spilling out your pillowcases and in all your winter jacket pockets and coming out the spout of your sink, your shower, your other sink, your friends are knocking at the door, and it's 92º. You've a burlap sack of the little guys in a grip.

Imagine the beach. Somehow, you've escaped your overrun apartment. The day is so hot you can't walk the baked-dry stretch from towel to tide, but that burlap sack of lemon cucumbers sits at your side and all your friends are there, shouting out, "Cucumber!" and holding their hands in some baseball-game positioning.

And you pass, and you eat of the lemon cucumber, as do your friends, and your teeth crack open the skin, and the soft green fruit inside bursts, and the flesh runs down your chin, and you are fed, and you are hydrated.

In my memory, the earthbound glory of the lemon cucumber is its ready accessibility. They were given to my family or traded for a few other vegetable starts. Sometimes, we had them in our fields. They're the type of thing you pluck from the vine, rub on your shirt, bite of then and there, and marvel at the wonder of fruits and vegetables, how water and soil alchemize into water (obviously) and vegetal matter (miraculously).

A chicken for every pot? A lemon cucumber in every hand.