As I was sitting at home tonight, eating my dinner of broccoli and asparagus, a familiar thought came to mind: What if aliens landed outside my window right now and whisked me off? How much of the mystery would the news reporters and cops be able to piece together from my belongings? Would they be able to tell I was eating dinner? Would the aliens take my broccoli and asparagus, too?

And what would my family make of all the stuff lying around my house? The guitar leans against the bed, with an old songbook open to Noel Coward's sentimental sweetheart, "I'll See You Again." A brand-new tennis racket stands in a corner, a graphite beauty that replaced the aluminum wreck I found in a dumpster. The aluminum wreck is in here somewhere, too, jammed in a closet. That new racket stands there virgin, expensive, unscratched -- and me kidnapped by aliens. What a waste!

On the windowsill there's a mini-greenhouse full of peat pots planted in melons, squash, basil, cucumbers. And the houseplants -- what will happen to them? And the cats? I'd like to have them kidnapped with me, though they usually hate trips.

Another thought always comes to mind: Is there anything incriminating lying around? Love letters from Dick Cheney, or my brother-in-law? An old issue of the National Enquirer or the Plain Truth? Or something that would set my family wondering, like fifty cans of olives, or a gun, or a three-hundred-dollar receipt from the Sex Shop Arcade?

But wait - I'm talking like I'm dead! The space aliens only whisked me away. They won't perform experimental surgery on me, or put me in a zoo or anything. Heck, no. They just heard I had a green thumb, and their race can't grow a green bean to save their lives. They're foragers and gatherers, not farmers. They grazed on the bounty of their lush planet for generations before they began to explore space.

Then they packed their spaceships full of nuts, seeds, and wild grains, which kept nicely during the long trips. Eventually they found Earth -- a bluish planet, on the small side, with wide variations between wet jungles and vast reaches of desert. The alien scouts explored the continents. They were quiet observers, not drawing attention to themselves nor fooling with the affairs of planet Earth. They took small samples of flora and minerals, and miles of videotape. They were big fans of the camcorder. Finally, they felt they'd shot enough newsreel and gathered enough samples, and they were ready to go home.

However -- and this is the big however - they'd found something on Earth that they loved so much, they knew they couldn't leave without it. In all their space travels, they'd come upon only this one exotic food so sensually satisfying, so robust in beauty and practicality, that they had to take some home to their people.

They had fallen in love with broccoli.

And how very lucky and appropriate that, through the grapevine, they heard about me -- not only a gardener, but an astronomy nut to boot. I read "Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars" umpteen times as a kid. What stupendous luck that I was sitting there with a plate of broccoli on my lap when they blinked me out of my house and into their ship! Of course I let them finish my broccoli -- there were eight of them and they had to cut it into very small pieces. I went ahead and finished my asparagus and we talked about that, too, but they'd already found that asparagus has much too short a season. I had to agree.

So the upshot was that they hoped to whisk me off to their planet so I could help them plant broccoli. You see, they said, they could buy a ton of it here wholesale and haul it back, but we all know broccoli doesn't keep well. Besides, a ton wouldn't feed that many aliens. They needed to grow some, and learn to grow some more. They needed some guidance, and maybe a how-to book. They assumed they'd have me back in a couple of months if I'd telephone my family and give them some story (don't mention aliens) so they wouldn't worry.

It all seemed straightforward enough. First, though, we had to go by the hardware store to get some peat pots (123 of them, all they had) and four different kinds of broccoli seeds (17 packages, all they had) and sixteen mini window greenhouses and 80 pounds of compost. This, I figured, would give them a start. The aliens, in disguise of course, were wonderful about carrying all that stuff out of the store. And they put it all on a charge card.

But then I had to have a serious talk with them. I love buying seeds and stuff as much the next gardener, but it was time to get down to sober talk, important matters. We sat in the ship for a few minutes and thrashed it out. The aliens finally gave in, and we swung by the house to pick up the cats.

The cats -- Iniki, Caesar, and Buster -- have taken well to weightlessness, and the aliens have taken well to them. We're a happy little cruiser -- broccoli sprouting in the steamy greenhouses, the cats and the aliens playing 3D-foil-ball-pounce. When I'm not playing with them, I'm tucked under a small reading light with one of the books I brought along. Today it's the encyclopedia, Volume A. It's about time I read it. I recite out loud, my hosts an enraptured audience. Aardvark. Acorn. Alien.

Amy Miller can be reached at amymca@earthlink.net. She can pick up e-mail from very far away.