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It’s silly, I know, that three words can mean so much.

But when uttered by a loved one or close friend, a neighbor, a co-worker, or, for that matter, the lady who does my dry cleaning, those three words change everything.

“I like cucumbers.”

Well, how about that? This is your lucky day. Because I just so happen to have with me a tote bag full of fresh-picked cucumbers. Big ones. Bigger ones. Also, giant ones.

Can’t find the cucumber that’s right for you? Stay right where you are. I’ve got more in the back of the station wagon. Plus several cardboard boxes full at home. And a new batch tomorrow. The day after that, too.

Do I seem eager? Am I coming on too strong? Try to understand. I’ve grown so used to rejection.

“I don’t eat cucumbers,” my mom said with finality, the last time I asked. “They make me burp.”

That was last summer, and I left it at that. To be honest, the cukes that young Mickey planted weren’t so hot. They didn’t get enough water. They turned yellow too soon. The vines shriveled along the ground.

Ah, but a year wiser at age 8, Mickey this time devised a new plan of attack. Rather than let the vines grow horizontally in the dirt, where the leaves turn limp in the hot sun and the cukes get overrun by ants, he would train them to grow vertically, Asian-style, on a plastic trellis snapped together from tomato stakes.

Onward and upward, the sky was the limit. Sure enough, after a few squirts of Miracle-Gro, results. Bright yellow flowers bloomed. Behind each one appeared a fuzzy, cocktail-sized cuke, smaller than his pinky.

“It’s working!” Mickey said, as we wrapped the tender shoots from the flowers around the legs of the trellis. “Look at all these cucumbers!”

Then came the July thunderheads, one behind the other like clockwork, and the garden was left to its own devices. We played backgammon, went to the movies, forgot all about the cucumbers.

Then one sunny Saturday morning, we ventured back to the garden, drying out from another all-night downpour. There, beneath scratchy leaves that billowed out like elephant ears, was a scene from “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” In 3-D.

It also looked like one of those World War II “Why We Fight” documentaries, showing rows of torpedoes rolling off the assembly line. No, these weren’t cucumbers. These were zeppelins. Unfettered by gravity, unimpeded by square footage inside the wire fence, they were hanging straight down, pendulum-style, on their sturdy stems,

Our neighbor, Bob, ambled over for a look. “I’ve put some cucumbers in at my son’s place,” he said, scratching his head, eyes big as saucers, “but nothing like this.”

Mickey took that as a compliment and later delivered to Bob’s door a cucumber the size of his forearm. Bob replied to this shot fired across his bow with a zucchini the size of a baseball bat. It was an arms race.

Bent on conquest, Mickey marched one door over to see Charlie.

“We’ve already got some,” Charlie said, getting in his van and gunning it up the street, leaving his wife behind. She thanked Mickey for the cucumber, went inside, and drew the blinds.

Clearly, it was our duty to eat them. Sliced for sandwiches. Cubed for salad. Grated in cold yogurt dressing. Mashed for gazpacho. But face it. When you’re down to eating cold soup, it’s time to wave the white flag.

“I don’t want more cucumbers,” said Suzzy, 10, suppressing a burp.

Yet that’s what we’ve got. More cucumbers. And nobody wants them. Not the rabbits nibbling at the basil. Not the chipmunks burrowed under the okra plants. Not even the squirrels that plunder every ripe tomato.

Eureka. Why didn’t we think of this before? Just paint the cucumbers red.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com