Narrative Essay: Our "Finally" Peas
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| The peas are beautiful, fruitful, and healthy. |
Peas Present
Nothing in the garden looks great in mid-October, generally, but while I watered, I noticed the marigolds and peas were still marvelously perky and vibrantly colorful.
I watered the peas, cuddled the cat, photographed the peas, and subsequently drew the peas and the cat. This afternoon’s weather was beautiful. The peas were too beautiful to ignore. They reminded me of peas past.
Peas Past
I remember two specific attempts to grow peas, or more accurately my attempts to grow peas and my father's attempts, I suspect, to connect with me in some way. It was easy for him to connect with my sister because she liked sports, and it was fairly easy to connect with my stepbrother, his stepson, because he lived there with him. Dad really had to try with me, though. I was the reader, the artist, the animal lover, the quiet type.
The first time we tried to grow peas we used a plastic flower box and maybe some dirt from the yard, topsoil and clay. He got some seeds and we followed the directions on the packet for spacing and depth. We watered them, I am sure. Dad took us back to our mother's for two weeks, and he was in charge of the peas. When we came back the soil was gray, so dry it was cracked like a broken ceramic pot. There were no peas.
We tried again. “Peas are easy to grow,” maintains Lee Taylor and the home gardening experts at Michigan State University’s Extension Service. The second time we tried he cut a 50-gallon blue plastic barrel in half long ways, and we filled it with soil and planted our peas. We did not, as Lee Taylor and the home gardening experts at Michigan State University’s Extension Service recommend, use compost, add stakes, plant in cool weather, or add an inch of water a week. Again, two weeks or every-other-weekend later, the soil was bone dry and all the potential life in the seeds had dried up, as well.
We didn't try again, but I did bring him dwarf Japanese Maple seedlings from my yard the year before he died, and they, too, dried up. I found the carcasses on the picnic table on the patio still in the plastic pots that had only ever been meant for transport.
Realization
Jane Shellenberger, author of Organic Gardener's Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West, states “There are many paths leading to a garden and many experiences awaiting those who venture in. No matter what your motive—whether to grow healthy, delicious food; spend time outdoors feeling more alive than your desk job allows; help save the planet; find relaxation, solace, or healing; meet your neighbors; get your hands in the sweet earth; or discover for yourself just how abundant and generous nature can be—a garden rarely disappoints. It’s a magnet for life in all its quirky, beautiful forms.” Whatever our pea-planting purpose may have been, I did stop to think about my dad today and appreciate his efforts, efforts I have not stopped to appreciate before.
I haven't been able to talk to him in over a year except distantly, through tertiary conversation with my stepmother (whose tomatoes flourished magically this year, by the way). We haven't laughed about something the cats have done or reminisced about funny little things like peas so dried up the soil cracked open. I haven't been able to bring him new plants in pots meant only for transport. He hasn't been able to marvel at our long growing season down here or tell me how excited he is to go hunting up there. Maybe, though, he's had something to do with the peas this year, these beautiful, fruitful, healthy, peas; our “finally” peas.
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Works Cited
Shellenberger, Jane. Organic Gardener's Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West. Fulcrum Publishing, 2012.
Taylor, Lee. “How to grow peas.” Smart Gardening, April 29, 2009, camr.msu.edu.
Copyright Amy Lynn Hess. Please contact the author for permission to republish.
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