'They Are Read When They're No Longer There'

One of my annual jobs as a boy, self-assigned, was tending the portulaca that grew along both sides of the driveway -- hundreds of plants in narrow plots flanking the gravel. In the fall I harvested the black seeds, each a little larger than a salt crystal. It took several days, plucking the pods and rolling them between my fingers so the seeds fell into one of my father’s empty pipe tobacco cans. There was always a bumper crop. The following spring, once the snow had passed, I reversed the process and sowed the seeds.

 

To this day I enjoy some of the jobs – those with satisfyingly identifiable beginnings and ends -- that others deem tedious. I’m reassured by the completion of projects. The only person who paid attention to my portulacas was the old, red-haired German widow, Elsie Becker, who lived next door. She occupied two lots, one of which was an ambitious vegetable garden surrounded, European-style, by flowers. At the center was a peach tree that reliably produced fruit, which she shared with the neighborhood kids. She was a library of folklore and plant lore. I thought of my portulacas and Frau Becker when rereading “The Sweet Peas” (Toward the Winter Solstice, 2006) by Timothy Steele:

 

“The season for sweet peas had long since passed,

And the white wall was bare where they’d been massed;

Yet when that night our neighbor phoned to say

That she had watched them from her bed that day,

I didn’t contradict her: it was plain

She struggled with the tumor in her brain

And, though confused and dying, wished to own

How much she’d liked the flowers I had grown,--

And when she said, in bidding me good night,

She thought their colors now were at their height --

Indeed, they never had looked lovelier --

The only kind response was to concur.

 

“Thereafter, as a kind of rite or rule,

Each autumn when the days turned damp and cool,

I’d sow peas gathered from the last year’s pods.

I’d watch as young plants, bucking storms and odds,

Mounted the net and buds appeared on stems

While, using self-supporting stratagems,

Fine tendrils twined in mid-air, each to each,

Or to the mesh of screens within their reach

Until the vines and blossoms waved aloof

Of net and eaves in full view of the roof,

As if reporting, situated so,

News of the heavens to the yard below.

 

“And I’d recall her, who had loved their scent,

But who, in spite of my encouragement,

Was shy of picking them until I said

They flowered the more that they were harvested.

(Red blooms came earliest, and, when they’d peaked,

The purples followed, and the salmon-streaked;

All equally attracted moth and bee.)

Meanwhile, her phone call gathered irony:

If, at the end, she’d summoned back somehow

Those vanished sweet peas, their descendants now

Returned the favor, having been imbued

With her departed grace and gratitude.

 

“When blossoms -- each with banner, wings, and keel --

Stir in the warmth above me while I kneel

And weed around the bottom of the plants,

I sometimes think that, if they had the chance,

They’d sail off after passing bird or cloud.

I sometimes hope that, if it was allowed,

She felt within her what she loved when she

Passed from this to that other mystery

And kept, by way of comfort, as she went,

The urge to complication and ascent

Which prints such vivid signatures on air

That they are read when they’re no longer there.”

 

It was Frau Becker who taught me that portulaca is also known as purslane, which is grown as a salad vegetable. The English gardener and diarist John Evelyn translated

The Compleat Gard’ner (1693) from the French of Jean de La Quintinie. In it he writes: “Purslain is one of the prettiest Plants in a Kitchen-garden, which is principally used in Sallets, and sometimes in Pottages.”