Every second Friday I wait at home waiting for a text from the vegetable box delivery van. The box can arrive any time between 7am and 7pm, and is typically left directly in front of the door to my building, with the eggs balanced on top. The door opens outwards so if I am not quick enough to get downstairs when the doorbell rings I end up trapped inside by the very vegetables I am trying to retrieve, until a neighbour comes along to rescue me.
I started getting the vegetable box in July, when Melbourne went into lockdown for the second time. Avoiding the supermarket seemed a good idea and the grocer at the Prahran market, which I very rarely patronised in the before times out of sheer laziness, was just up the road.
I can’t recall what was in the first box, other than a lot of parsnips. The second contained a bunch of English spinach, choy sum, a huge bunch of kale, flat beans, a pineapple, strawberries, potatoes, three carrots, an onion, a bunch of radishes, more parsnips, broccoli, miscellaneous winter fruits, an enormous fennel, a tiny avocado, and one passionfruit. It was a pretty good haul. I sent an excited video to my sister – all this, for $30! – and thought that would be the end of it.
I had not accounted for Hugo.
Hugo is my nephew. He is four years old but with the habits of an umarell, the old men in Italy who pass the time watching construction sites. Hugo likes using a measuring tape and using a screwdriver and wearing his dad’s hard hat and counting how many fire extinguishers are in every building he enters. He likes cooking and being allowed to top and tail the beans. And he is extremely interested in groceries.
When we last got together as a family, in February, Hugo corralled all available adults into playing the shopping game, which is “go fish” but with groceries. You have a shopping list then take turns flipping over little cards to see if they contain a picture of any of the things on your list, and Hugo spends the entire time asking everyone he has roped into playing if they like aubergine, with the baroque pronunciation of an American in a French cooking class.
Hugo, you see, does not like aubergine. It is very important that everyone’s likes and dislikes are on the table.
The day after I sent the first video, my sister sent back a video of Hugo watching me unpacking the vegetable box and reciting my commentary word-for-word. He particularly liked the “spinachy bits”, which was how I described sundry leafy greens, and the tiny avocado.
I watched Hugo watching my video at least a dozen times.
When you live on opposite sides of the country to loved ones who are too young to really get long chats on the phone, video is sometimes all you have. The everyday moments of connection, the ways in which you can let a small human know they are important to you and safe with you, don’t happen. You don’t babysit or pick them up from childcare or take them to swimming lessons. You just fly in once a year and build up a rapport just in time to fly home.
But now we are bound by groceries.
After the first vegetable box video received such a strong critical reception, I started filming the unboxing every fortnight, regrettably introducing Hugo to the word “unboxing” in the process. He is eternally frustrated by my inability to film the box and unpack it at the same time – the continuity gap between a full box of vegetables and vegetables lined up on the bench is unforgivable.
I started grouping the vegetables together and counting them for the video, in an effort to be a vaguely good influence. This was probably not necessary. Hugo is quite good at counting but the lessons he takes are never the ones you intended. He likes to eat spinachy bits like Aunty Calla but refuses to eat spring onion, also like Aunty Calla. He has a memory like a steel trap, which is great for cognitive development but can emerge in inopportune ways. Such as when he cheerfully informed my sister’s boss, who said the “G” button in the lift was for ground, that actually according to his Aussie Legends alphabet book “G” was for Julia Gillard. (I highly recommend this book, if only to hear a toddler pronounce the name of Sydney Opera House architect Jørn Utzon.)
My sister has started saving up the videos to distract Hugo when she needs to tend to his little sister, who has just started gumming on vegetables but is not yet interested in my high class vegetable cinema. Apparently it is very useful for keeping him still on the toilet, which, as a childless aunt who lives 3,300km away, is about as useful as I can hope to be.
Hugo will probably lose interest in the vegetable box soon. He will channel all his energy into his other great passions, vacuuming and using the hedge trimmer, and we will have nothing in common until he turns 14 and needs help to dye his hair green.
But for as long as he keeps watching, I will send videos. And the distance will seem a little shorter.
