Ammi Midstokke: Memory seeds and magic beans

Much to my surprise and despite statistical precedent, my garden produced vegetables this year. Some of them were even edible. Much of it was just curious.

For example, I had six beans in a Ziplock bag. The bag was unlabeled but clearly for planting because it was with all the other mystery seeds I own. They were marbled with deep purple. Since everyone knows that a few solo beans are probably magic, I planted them near a trellis and waited.

While I waited, I planted beets and kohlrabi and eggplants and other things I like to eat. I planted far more tomatoes than should be legally allowed, some radishes that did not radish, and several varieties of flowers and carrots and seeds with names I didn’t recognize.

Most of my seeds have come from a friend who is now gone. She gardened for her sanity, which seems odd, because gardening is more likely to lead to my own insanity. She eventually succumbed to all the other things that ought to make everyone crazy but merely got her diagnosed, like she was the anomaly in an anomalous world.

This is not to suggest those living with mental illness are not facing some unique variables in their life experience. What I wonder is why we are not all mentally ill, though research tells us that more than half of us will meet the criteria within our lifetime.

Before my friend could tell me how to care for the seeds or plant them or what kind of magic the beans had, she was gone. It was abrupt in the way that leaves one in disbelief, even as I was certain I could feel the heartstrings of our connection severed. She left without giving me a guide to gardening all these seeds that remain, along with a few old letters, as the precious cargo of our friendship.

My friend could grow anything, and she collected the seeds from anything she grew. She folded them into hand-made pouches and mailed them to me in packages of promise. Nigella, sorrel, melons. This squash and that pumpkin, and seeds I had never heard of that looked like alien things altogether.

I covet these packets and their contents, their taped edges and their handwritten labels. When I rattle them, I hear the seeds roll across the folded paper and I imagine her hands pulling open the pods of nigella and encouraging the fleck of black seeds into handmade envelopes. I can hear her singing to the seeds, for she was always singing, probably making up songs of gratitude for the harvest, promise for next year’s growth.

When I opened the packets this year, I noticed the seeds were dwindling in number. Some years I do not plant everything, because my garden is small and I do not really like sorrel. But to run out of my friend’s seeds is to mourn the loss of her all over again, and I am not exactly done grieving the original severance. I doubt I ever will be. I still scroll through her text messages and read her letters, just to hear her voice in my head again.

I do not know how long unplanted seeds last. What if I keep them for too long and they lose their ability to germinate? Perhaps I should build a temperature-controlled bunker with a seed library, though just putting them in the freezer might do.

Then this fall as I was picking through my garden for things to save from the frost, and I noticed the nigella had produced pods that rattled. And the magic beans (which turned out to be Marvel of Venice) had taken over an entire corner of the garden and hidden swollen pods deep within their determined vines. The culinary mustard was leaning heavy over the edges of the bed with the weight of their own pointy shells.

So I plucked them and set them in the sun to dry.

And when they were dry, I brought them inside and sang to them as I pried them apart and sorted them into piles and scribbled labels. Singing to seeds must be like offering a lullaby for them to hibernate for the winter. I will have to sing a different song when it is time to plant them again. I wish I had listened more closely.

In this way, my dear friend might return each season with her generosity and tenderness. She will unfurl in my spring soil, sit at the dinner table and bring music to my autumn harvest. When her children have grown and have gardens of their own, I will send them handmade packets of their mother’s heirloom seeds.

I hope they still remember her songs, so the seeds will recognize them and grow. Then maybe she will meet her grandchildren through their dirty fingers and carrot-chomping teeth and they will feel her love in the subtle ways she has left it to seed and reseed in our lives.

And every spring when the delicate purple flowers of the nigella bloom in my yard, I will feel as though she has visited to come bless my garden and encourage me. For if seeds are all we have, it falls upon us to cultivate them into something upon which we can sustain ourselves.

Ammi Midstokke can be reached at ammim@spoksman.com