Of Peas and Pods
June of 1974 and July of 2007, Odense and Copenhagen, Denmark, and St. Petersburg, Florida
By Anne Visser Ney
“She’s going to chat rooms now. I try to monitor it. I want to keep her safe.”
My friend Elizabeth confides about her daughter Erin’s Internet habits while I clean sugar snap peas for dinner. She is conspiratorial. “I want to stay ahead of her. You know?”
While she chats, I think about the day I learned to shell peas. I was a 16-year-old exchange student in Denmark homesick as a lost toddler, even though my Danish family was warm, taking me on a tour of the summer-lovely country, with its golden millet fields and whitewashed farm buildings.
In Odense, we visited Hans Christian Andersen’s house and stayed with the grandparents Farfar and Farmor. The family jockeyed over Farmor’s dinner table to practice English with me, their American teenager. Farmor, who spoke only Danish, studied me quietly, and now I imagine that she saw how forlorn I felt among the boisterous family members.
An outing had been planned for the next day, but when morning came, I feigned a cold and retreated to the bedroom, where I buried my head in a pillow.
After the family drove off, Farmor appeared in my doorway. I faked a cough and blew my nose. She took my hand, led me outside into her emerald-green garden, pointed to wooden clogs and gave me a metal bucket. With the clogs keeping my feet dry on the muddy path, I followed her toward lush pea vines snaking up wood-slat trellises.
There, we plucked the ripe pods wordlessly while my misery festered in the silence. Before long, fat tears rolled down my cheeks and plunked into the bucket. Farmor kept working.
After we finished, she pulled up garden chairs, offered me a seat and showed me how to string the pod, then use my thumb to slide the peas into her kitchen bowl. Then she snapped the pod in half, peeled off the filmy inner membrane and handed it to me. “Eat it,” she said in Danish.
It was crisp and sweet. I genuinely smiled for the first time in days. Farmor smiled back, eyes blue as Christmas plates, white hair swept from her smooth face.
Elizabeth continues, “So I got her login name and password, and went through every level in the site. There are fewer protections as you go. I just worry.”
“Uh-huh.” Snap. My memory hums.
I hugged Farmor tightly before getting in the car to leave Odense. “Tak,” I whispered into her ear. Thanks. She waved as we drove away.
Soon the Jutland coast swept off to the west, with sand dunes separating the North Sea from cobalt inlets in Danish fjords. Later, back in Copenhagen, I visited the Round Tower, Tivoli, and the small statue of Den Lille Havfrue - the Little Mermaid - dwarfed in the harbor by ocean-seasoned freighters and tanker ships.
When August came, I hugged my exchange family good-bye and flew home.
“You look so grown-up!” my mother exclaimed after I cleared Customs in Detroit. She was crying.
I cried too, feeling oddly homesick again. I now understand that it was a feeling of growing up, of letting go of my mother and of the girl that I had been at the start of the summer. It was a feeling of embracing the young woman I had become.
Elizabeth’s discussion has moved on to the Harry Potter series. She is reading ahead to make sure nothing too disturbing to Erin lurks in the stories. “I’m on book 3 now,” she says.
“How many are there?” My own son left Harry – and the world – behind years ago, following a childhood cancer.
“Seven.” She eats a cracker. “Should I tell Erin she can’t read it if it gets too … weird?”
I think about Den Lille Havfru, who drinks witch’s poison, walks “on sharp knives and pointed daggers,” and chooses to fling herself into the sea rather than plunge a bloody knife into her beloved’s heart. Such was her drive to become human: better to dissolve into foam and spend eternity roaming the sea than to remain a child forever.
“What do you think?” Elizabeth says.
I want to tell her that I think the world is full of thresholds that cannot be recovered, once they are crossed. That it is difficult for anyone to let go. That it is easier to look back than to look ahead.
My mother said she cried when I left for Denmark. She watched taillights disappear into the Midwestern night, speeding her oldest daughter toward people and places that she would never see or know. But she let me go.
When the time came, I let my son go. Because there was no choice, maybe. But is there ever one, really? Hans Christian Andersen let his mermaid go. Someday, Elizabeth will have to let Erin go.
I think that parents anticipate a child’s path until one day, the son or daughter shouts, “Look, Mom! Check it out, Dad – over there!” They point to something only they can see and rush ahead while we wonder, in our grieving, if anything can sustain us after the letting-go.
Elizabeth waits for an answer. I set the cleaned peas on the counter. “Did you know I visited Denmark once?”
I offer her a tentative Farmor smile and a raw pod. “Have one. They’re good.” And as though I, myself, have just understood the lesson granted to me 30-odd years ago, I once again genuinely smile and add, “Even after the peas are gone.”
Anne Ney is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Rosebud Magazine, Tea Party Magazine, the Eckerd Review, and other print and online journals. She holds degrees in biology and creative writing. Her writing has earned awards from Eckerd College, the National Association of Institutions for Military Education Services, and the Southeastern Writers Association.
Posted by Common Ties on Monday, October 1st, 2007 | Email This PostThis entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 12:02 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
6 Responses to “Of Peas and Pods”
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October 4th, 2007 at 8:18 am
There is a simple beauty in sharing that lasts through time and change. Thanks for the sweet literary pea pod. It’s quite tasty.
October 4th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Having lived overseas (Scotland) for several years, I understand the emotion of the airport scene and the pain of homesickness. I am currently in the process of “letting go” — going through a divorce and wanting to help my soon to be ex-husband but knowing that, at times, it is no longer my place to do so. I think the phrase “Let go and let God” is appropriate in these situations. My brother moved to Mongolia to be a missionary — my parents couldn’t stop him. They just had to let go and trust God. You had to let your son go. Your Mum had to let you go. We have to let go of our innocence and let go of our kids too - my son is in Grade 3 and sometimes the world seems harsh and cruel looking at it through his tender eyes. Thanks for your contribution and bringing up all these philosophical thoughts!!
October 6th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
‘Of Peas and Pods’ has brought me to tears because I know what it means to have to let go. My mother, the most tender and beautiful soul, who I love with all my heart, became afflicted with dementia seven years ago. I took her hands in mine and reassured her that she and I had always been able to communicate and we always would; I knew we would “find a way”. I began to prepare myself for the struggle that I knew lay ahead, and I did have small moments of grief as parts of my best friend faded. But like Den Lille Havfru’s story, things took turn after awful turn. My father began to neglect her and keep her isolated, and she ended up a case with the province. Through the years of fighting to to help for her, I had to “drink poison”: get permission to see her from the very man who was neglecting her, permission that was rarely granted. When I did get the chance, I often had to “walk on sharp knives”: endure his company to be with her. And I became mute: I spoke no ill of him to her in order to preserve her much-needed belief that he was a good husband. I could not plunge that knife into her heart. On August 16th, 2007, I was blessed to have a few precious hours - one last intimate time alone with my mother - the night before my father ended her life and his own. My lifelong friend consoles me as your story does: she reminds me to look beyond the absence of her, what seems like an empty shell, and celebrate all the good things about her that are still here: her sweet joyfulness, her tenderness, her love.
October 6th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
Beautifuly written. What a wonderful way of looking at the world of parents and children. Thank-you! T
October 27th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
It was I who cried as the plane lifted into the evenng sky, heading for such a far-off place. I wondered if we would ever see her again–so when she returned, smiling, to us, I cried again with relief. Since then, there have been many lettings-go–into the U.S. Coast Guard in 1979, a beautiful young woman to serve among many strange men, some hostile; to become a navigator and sail the seas through storms and heavy weather, far away from any coast, or companionable ships. Had she not gone, she would never have looked up into starry nights, the brightness of whose sparkle she had never dreamed of. She navigated Alaskan waters safely that had never been charted and learned how to conduct herself like a firm but fair officer. Later, training recruits, one of her worst fears was that I might be hiding in the bushes when she found words in her salty vocabulary to discipline her young charges. Bit by bit, I had let her go.
It happened once when she came home on leave from a desk assignment on shore that she could persuade no old friends to spend a few days of her leave hiking on the Long Trail. I was the only one willing, and free, to travel back with her to her duty station. Since it was in New England, I tucked my volume of Robert Frost in my pocket. To my surprise, she had memorized poem after poem of his work. Her personal life at that time had come to a crossroads, and she begged me tearfully not to leave. Tearful myself, I knew I had to allow her to work things out for herself–another moment of letting go.
There have been so many! Maybe it\’s a parent\’s job to open the hands that hold our young so protectively, releasing them to the \”fair winds and following seas\” and to an unknown, uncaring future. I found a small, tattered but lovely owl\’s feather near my back door recently. I placed it on a chest near the door where I marvel at its light delicacy, subtle markings and ethereal design, all of which clearly remain. An owl required that (and others) to fly silently through the night, on its quest to find a path through the darkness, avoiding limbs and dark tree trunks, to find food, companionship and purpose, to grow into the creature it was meant to be. Our human feathers, too, become tattered after the risks they\’ve taken during their deft, tedious work. But new ones grow and we fly on, leaving the dark nights behind and, sometimes, even the small grave of a beautiful child, as well.
November 23rd, 2007 at 7:39 am
On the day after thanksgiving as I clean up emails and plan my day I read \”Of peas and pods\”. I don\’t think it was coincidental that I am reading it today as this was a day I needed to do some letting go. It seems that some of the most intimate moments and biggest insights are made over food preparation and this is the perfect example. What a beautiful story.