Mist is rising and slowly being burned off by the sun. Fog covers everything. I can hear, though, what I am told is the neighbor's rooster. At first it is very cool and I am totally fascinated as the sun rises and reveals to me the incredible otherworldly beauty of my great aunt Lola's vegetable garden.

I am now 45 years old and I can still vividly recall this experience when I must have been only four or five. We have just traveled from Midland, Texas to Madill, Oklahoma the day before and arrived after the sun went down for what will be a weeks visit. This is my first experience, too, having come from the desert of such exuberant greenery and insect life. Looking back, I compare my first glimpse of Aunt Lola's vegetable garden to the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy has just been plopped down house and all in Oz and she first opens her front door to that magnificent Munchkinland.

I leave Aunt Lola's screened-in back porch to go among what I now know to have been black-eyed pea bushes and okra bushes and squash vines. The black-eyed peas and I were about the same height and I was enchanted with the vining tendrils and most delicate of blossoms. The okra blossoms, so beautiful with their violet centers. I discover, however, that though beautiful to look at they are most unpleasant to touch--all spiny and sticky. And, of course, what were to me, the breathtakingly beautiful squash blossoms (for years when asked my favorite flower, I would reply -- a squash). Then to be told and shown that these blossoms wilt and face and become a squash or an okra!

I remember, too, how absolutely taken I was with the rich insect life. The butterflies flitting seemingly aimlessly just above it all and dipping down occasionally for a sip of nectar. The lazy wasps droning in the air with their legs dangling beneath them adding a startling element of danger. Ladybugs were here and grasshoppers, too -- "They'll spit t"baccy juice in your eye", my grandpa would tell me. They always seemed so dressed up in what looked like a vest and coat, I couldn't believe they would even chew tobacco.

It must have rained in Madill recently as the mysterious red-spider mite was here with his magnificent red velvet. How in the world did that bug get covered in such perfect red velvet? he looked like a living ring box!

There was the tiniest lizard that was always tormentingly just outside my reach. it seemed he was playing with me as he darted in and out of my sight.

Right after breakfast, my grandmother, my mother, Aunt Lola and I all sat under the garden tree, drank iced tea and shelled back-eyed peas. I was given my own little bowl and after much fervent labor, I had a little over a whole handful of peas to show for my efforts. Dinner preparations began about mid-morning. Aunt Lola roasted a hen and prepared a pastry crust for what would be a lemon-meringue pie. Aunt Lola was a master pie maker and most amazingly of all (I remember my mother commenting on it at the time, but didn't fully appreciate it until much later) she whipped her meringue by hand! This was no limp little meringue that I, as an adult, could whip up with an electric mixer. Oh, no! Aunt Lola's meringue was a good two-inch thick affair that just glistened with drizzled egg whites and sugar.

This week would prove to have a lot of firsts for me -- a chocolate coke, throwing rocks at coke bottles lined up on a fallen tree trunk in the back of Aunt Lola's combination store and gas station, chasing lightening bugs, seeing up close a mule.. But I have never forgotten that first morning in her vegetable garden. The experience and memory have formed me and I continue to be awed at this wondrously diverse world.

If someone were to tell you and I that we were going to a place that had the most beautiful emerald green carpet that was alive, and above it an azure ceiling with ever-changing colors and lights that were miles and miles above our heads; this place would be furnished with an absolutely endless parade of organisms with all manner of blooms, vines, leaves, fruit; this world would be peopled with an infinite variety of creatures all sizes and shapes and habits that would fill the air, ground and waters, would we believe them?

We do live in a world just like that.