They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but some of us didn’t have a choice. Some of us met our heroes way before they became our heroes. We met them at the grocery store in the produce aisle. They were chilling with all the other sweet potatoes, and taking a sweet potato home is a pretty normal thing to do when you’re at the grocery store. So, we brought the little spud home even though we don’t even really like sweet potatoes and stored it in our cupboard for the day we wake up with completely different taste buds.
They say all the cells in your body get replaced every seven years. We haven’t had the sweet potato for seven years, so we still don’t like sweet potatoes because we still don’t have completely different taste buds. But that little orange trooper is not deterred by the fact that we’ve abandoned them. And one day, while we’re opening the cupboard to retrieve a potato that actually tastes good — russet — we notice the little guy has grown a leaf.
They say Tupac wrote “the rose that grew from concrete” as a metaphor, but the sweet potato growing in our cupboard was real. It had managed to convince itself it was underground and decided it was time to be a parent. This entire time, we thought we needed to get our finances in order to do that, but our sweet potato has inspired us to jump in head first, no matter how shallow the pool is.
All this to say, even if you’re a weird vegetable no one likes, even if you get deserted in the back of a dark cabinet while your owner hopes you disappear, you can grow! This will not result in your owner planting you, BUT at least they’ll take a picture. So, don’t forget to smile. Be fearless, be brave, be sweet potato.
