If you hang around cerebral folks, you’ve likely heard the words “adage” and “idiom” escape their mouths.
For the record, “Adages, such as ‘a stitch in time saves nine,’ typically offer advice based on common sense or experience and are easily understood by people across different cultures. Whereas idioms, like ‘kick the bucket,’ convey meanings that can be puzzling to non-native speakers and often culturally specific,” according to askdifference.com
So, when someone uses the words “Too much of a good thing,” that, to me, can be very confusing. In my puny mind, that sentence can neatly fit into both of the adage, as well as idiom category. How can that be?
Let’s say you won the Powerball lottery which carries a jackpot that cannot be described as insignificant. Usually totaling in the multi-million-dollar range, that money brings as much angst as it does glee. Suddenly acquiring previously unknown friends and relatives, magically causes such needy people to appear, wholesale, with open hands.
The same holds true for those people from other cultures who cannot fathom there being any good thing that might be overburdening. Once again, too much of a good thing,
Think about trying to invest, save, be benevolent, even squander your newly found bonanza. Buying a deserving person a car, bar patrons a ‘round of drinks,’ or setting up a trust fund for a favorite relative or lifelong friend, can exude wealth that often creates rifts.
Too much of a good thing, again. As is evident, sharing the wealth, not unlike adages and idioms, can quickly become confusing.
But it was my sainted wife who unintentionally introduced a conundrum into our otherwise simplistic life. Being the end of July, when temperatures are regularly reaching three digits, and humidity on The Eastern Shore approaches 98% – a pleasant 98%, that is.
Personally, I’ve been planting a very modest 4’x6’ garden for over fifty-years, usually consisting of two cherry tomato plants, two Big Boy tomato plants, and often a couple of okras, as well as cucumbers. Each has their own place on my table. The cherries are for salads, Big Boys are used on sandwiches, while okra is for gumbo, and cukes are used in my salads, as well.
Not seeming like an extraordinary number of crops, planted correctly, the cherry tomatoes can yield several two-gallon buckets of fruit, as can the Big Boys, both of which are usually shared with friends and neighbors. The aforementioned okra excess must be frozen or pickled as people refer to them as slimy in their refusal of free veggies; for the record, they’re not.
But over the past few years with the expansion of my modest garden into a 7’x32’ plot, I am now able to plant more everything. I’ve written about cucumbers from my garden before, but now I decided we needed two additional cucumber plants since there was a five foot space adjacent to my newly introduced eggplants.
As luck would have it, this year is thus far promising to be a bumper year for many crops.
From time-to-time, a growing cycle appears in the fruit and vegetable growing seasons. Every four-years, or so, my black walnut trees produced an extraordinary abundance of nuts; other years, my plum trees thrived as did pears and apples in still different seasons.
Alignment of the planets – or whatever causes this phenomenon – seems to be right this year of 2025. As such, our first tomato was picked July 1st. Since then, it’s been tomatoes upon tomatoes from the Big Boy vines finding their way to our kitchen table.
Quickly approaching the beginning of August, we’ve also been harvesting an extraordinary number of cucumbers. In an effort of efficiency and frugality, my sainted wife has been accumulating Mason jars in order to can these green garden denizens.
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| A small portion of the cucumber bonanza |
Buying them by the case she’s become the best friend of the local hardware store who is delighted to sell these canning necessities. The good news is the washing, sterilizing, creating a brine, peeling, chopping, slicing, and finally canning more than 20-cucumbers yielded eight quarts of pickles.
The bad news is that the very next day, she picked another seven cukes with five more in the wings. Of course she panicked. Of course.
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Without a preconceived plan for excess cucumber disposal, she took to making casual, unannounced “welfare” visits to neighbors. And how fortuitous she had a small bag containing at least five fresh cucumbers with her.
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Wearing a giant smile, she would begin her conversation with an expression of concern that she had not seen our neighbor in several days. (The reason for that is the aforementioned oppressive heat and humidity.)
While extending her hand holding the bag chock full o’ cukes, she learned how to release the bag, turn her body in mid-air, and skedaddle before the unsuspecting neighbor could scream, “NOOOOO!”
Unfortunately, the neighbors quickly caught on to her shenanigans and subsequent visits were met with them hiding like felons anticipating a felony warrant being served. It soon became apparent the jig was up, and time for implementing Plan B.
My sainted wife seemed to be leaving the house often, at random times. Her excuses varied from “Goin’ shoppin’,” to “Returning a library book,” even “Visiting some sick friend.”
Suspecting something nefarious was going on I decided to surreptitiously follow her. Sure enough, she wound up at the Tallmart store where I espied her sneakily placing our surplus cucumbers in the store’s vegetable bins, cleverly camouflaging them as genuine Tallmart produce which an unsuspecting consumer would hopefully give a new home.
It’s quite a shame that we have so much available food that we are unable to give it away.
And now you have another example of both an adage and idiom: Too much of a good thing.
