Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Friday, July 25, 2025

The Ten-Year-Old Boy

I have not fully grown, in the sense that the ten-year-old boy I once was is really only playing hide and seek inside me. He still steps forward now and again to throw a stick over a tree or kick at an anthill.

That boy in me is impulsive. He regularly does things for no profitable reason, and boredom quickly brings him out to begin fidgeting with anything at hand.

Yesterday, ten-year-old me took after the yucca plants in my yard. One of the stalks bearing seed pods had bent over in a way that annoyed me.

Our Montana variety of yucca is sometimes called soapweed. Native American tribes such as the Lakota, Dakota, and Blackfoot used the mashed or boiled roots of the plant as a natural soap and shampoo, particularly for washing hair and treating scalp conditions. Theoretically, the seed pods can be eaten when still young and green inside. A few years ago, as an adult, I tried eating a green yucca seed pod.

Ungood.

Absolutely bitter. Medicine-tasting stuff.

Anyhow, I whacked down several yucca stalks bearing seed pods and then sliced several pods open just because I could. I like the patterns produced by the seeds. Yucca are proficient producers of seeds—a single plant might produce 600 to 6,000 of them.

Just in case you’re bored right now, I’m sharing photographs of the seed pods—including one featuring the pods alongside a Cold Smoke beer. This will give you some manner of comparison between delicious and yucky.

A Yucca Plant

Pods With a Cold Smoke Beer (For Proper Size Reference)

Pod Slices

—Mitchell Hegman

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