I knew it was a pretty long walk, like a mile!

Dad usually drove to the green grocer

But he wasn’t home yet

Mom gave me some change

She called it silver, though it wasn’t really

Go buy a big head of lettuce for supper

I was almost there when I passed that empty lot

So many flowers had taken it over

They looked like pink and purple daisies with a yellow sun in the center

The stems were like wild feathery weeds blowing in the summer breeze

My friend Linda had them in her yard

She told me they were called cosmos

And cosmos also meant the universe or something like that

I rounded the corner to John’s green grocery store

Right out front was a big wooden table filled to overflowing

The biggest, shiniest lettuces I ever saw were there waiting for me

And now I knew why they call it a head of lettuce

They were big and round as a head–and only a dime

John put the best one in a brown paper bag

Told me to hold the bag from the bottom

When I passed the cosmos flowers again I got thinking

Lettuce heads look kind of like the earth, big and round

Cosmos look like a bursting sun with pink sunbeams

Lots of things look like other things in nature

That bag weighed a ton by the time I got home

I’d walked the whole neighborhood, my whole cosmos

But there was more to learn about how things can look alike

Mom laughed when she opened the heavy bag

But I could tell she was a little mad at me

When she said she’d have to make coleslaw

That’s what you do with a big head of Long Island cabbage