I am like a master defoliant.

One could take this attitude of the soil for me and my minstrations as a defense mechanism on the part of Mother Earth. ("Here he comes again with his pesticides and potions. Let's get him for sure this time.")

And the garden does. The rosebushes tend to claw at my trousers and sleeves, my back aches after a few hours of pulling weeds, and the watering system (which I consider part of the garden, especially in California) is constantly not working properly.

Though I mow the lawn grudgingly, that doesn't keep the weeds out. The lawn (and the garden in general) doesn't like me. Nature doesn't like me. And, may I add, the feeling is mutual.

I suppose that's natural. I don't like plants, the good earth or grubbing it. My antipathy for all things agricultural goes back to my childhood (like most of our phobias and neuroses). And it has a kind of Oedipus Regina aspect to it.

I blame my mother for it, but let me begin at the beginning.

I grew up in a community where prune- picking was the job of kids, any kind of kids and any age. That probably was because you didn't have to pay kids much to pick prunes (8 to 10 cents a box when I was in the market) and because they were readily at hand. They were, in fact, about all that most ranchers could afford. One might even call them slave labor except for the fact that usually it was their mothers and fathers that put them to work in the orchards. I'm sure the parents would have considered their intentions the best.

Anyway, when I was 8 years old, my mother thought it would be a good idea for me to pick prunes. One of my uncles was orchard boss and so he was designated as a kind of baby sitter and Simon Legree to be sure I didn't wander far from my box and bucket.

My mother kindly wrapped an old vinegar bottle with cloth, filled it with water, packed me a lunch in a paper bag and sent me out into the harvest.

It happened to be a year when there was a bumper crop of prunes. For the uninitiated, prunes were (and still are, I guess) shaken off the tree to the ground. That's where one picks them, one at a time. In those days they were picked into buckets and the buckets dumped into boxes. These days if there are any prunes left, they are shaken and picked mechanically. No more stoop labor. (Why couldn't I have been born in 1996?)

So I picked prunes. I crouched or knelt on the clods and stared at the little plump purple plums until I could see them in my sleep at night. I picked them one by one into my bucket. I think I may have cried. I know I certainly felt like it.

I was a terrible prune-picker. I don't think I ever managed to pick more than 10 boxes a day.

It would be pleasant to tell you that this happy orchard experience happened only once. Alas, it was not so. My involuntary servitude to the prune lasted until I was 18. I not only picked them, I shook them off the tree (with a very long pole), picked the 50-pound boxes up with a truck to cart them off to the dehydrator, and finally I worked in a packing plant that packed the prunes after they were dried.

This, at least, did not involve being in an orchard, but it did make it possible to live with the smell of dried prunes all summer.

From this long immersion in the life agricultural I developed what has turned out to be a lifelong antipathy for the soil. I don't like kneeling on it, I do not relish getting my hands dirty, I am happy if plants and trees grow so long as someone else tends to them, and though I like fruit and vegetables, I like them best if someone else grows them.

Well may you say this is all irrational, that planting and growing a garden is not the same as picking prunes off the good earth. But then phobias and neuroses are irrational, so I make no apologies for my attitude.

Fortunately, this attitude or gene or whatever it is that has so biased me against the soil does not apply to other members of my family. My son, for instance, seems to have inherited his green thumb from his mother. He has planted a lovely garden and has made his plants not only grow but flourish. He is quite content to bask in their beauty and admire their flowers.

So though the flowers outside the back door are lying in wait for me the next time I go out to empty the garbage, they will only applaud if my son shows up.

He's got a green thumb, and they know it.

More's the pity.