Sweet potatoes
By Choi Tae-hwan
On wrapping up this week's work, I hurried to the bus stop for a Saturday rendezvous with my wife at a small country terminal where she was waiting for me. I make it rule to have this rendezvous with my wife so we can save gasoline by riding together in her car for a weekend together at our country house, located halfway between her workplace and our apartment.
She kept pestering me the past few days to dig up the sweet potatoes because she’s eager to see how many we have this year and to see how big they grew, even though she was totally uninterested in planting them just four months ago. On this weekend, while enjoying a traditional Korean high and blue autumn sky with a cool breeze with a touch of warmth in the air, my wife and I were lost in the moment as we dug up sweet potatoes from a dry field located on a high hill overlooking our country house and village.
This year my wife and I were filled with a sense of pleasure and excitement as we harvested lots of big sweet potatoes from the rich soil under the golden sunshine, especially since we had failed to harvest any during the previous two years due to bad soil and lack of sufficient sunlight. But my wife was convinced it was due to my poor farming skills since I was still learning the ropes. I was reluctant to dig up all the rows of sweet potatoes because I think they need another one or two weeks to grow.
But, to our surprise, the sweet potatoes we dug up were much bigger than expected, definitely big enough to greatly satisfy my excited wife, as she’s engaged in cropping pumpkin sweet potato which is one of the between meal snacks she absolutely loves. She desperately tried to dig up another row of potatoes, even as I asked her to wait to do it next week.
Honestly speaking, I don't care for sweet potatoes, unlike my wife, as they bring up bad memories from my youth. It’s true that sweet potatoes remind me of my home during my elementary school days when sweet potatoes were regarded as one of most important staple foods in Korea due to many people not having enough food and often going hungry. As soon as I would wake up in the early morning, I found a big wooden basket of sweet potatoes right near the upper corner of my head and had no choice but to eat them until I could eat no more, because we had little rice and no other delicious foods as we do now.
Along with my brothers and sisters, we made it a rule to fill our stomachs with sweet potato, mainly a watery mashed form. At that time, I remember many kids would show up at elementary school full from eating sweet potato and would then stink up the whole classroom, since mashed sweet potato is notorious for causing people to pass lots of gas.
With excitement and satisfaction from having successfully filled three full boxes with sweet potatoes harvested from two rows, my wife and I began picking the sprouts off the vegetables. We plan to dry them out and then cook them from a stack of sweet potato stems, considered one of the most delicious foods during Korean autumn. Suddenly my cell phone rings. It’s my high school senior.
Actually, he’s the guy who helped me adjust to this new country life and start farming. He’s always tried to share various crops with me whenever we have happened to run into each other near his house and fields. It pleases me immensely that I can now give him some of my newly harvested sweet potato sprouts and sweet potatoes.
Gazing down at the nearby village and glancing up the traditional Korean high blue high sky, I watered the numerous cabbage and white radish plants sitting just beside the sweet potatoes, which made me feel quite proud of owning and working each weekend at such a lovely country house. Walking back to my country house carrying two boxes of sweet potatoes, all the various Korean autumn crops still in the process of ripening, such as the pumpkins, persimmons, beans and eggplants, seemed to say to me, ``Welcome Mr. Choi! You did a great job for this week! Now enjoy this wonderful country's beauty and happiness!" And I replied, ``Thank you so much! Have a good night! See you tomorrow, my friend!"
The writer is an English teacher at Jeonnam Middle School in Gwangju. He can be reached at cth0707@hanmail.net.