Garden peas

This year, we've been growing peas. I love growing things, I always have. Gardening, canning, and otherwise preserving food is something I've always enjoyed, and living in Alaska made it seem like more of a necessity in my life than just a pleasant hobby. (If you lived there, you'd understand. The state has a precarious food supply at the best of times.)
Here, I'm amazed by the abundance of foods we can grow. Not just the number and variety, but also the fact that there are multiple seasons in which to grow. In Alaska gardeners spend the entire beginning of the year in anticipation. Waiting, planning, scrapping the plan for a new one, and more waiting. Finally, sometime in May, the trees leaf out and you go. Everything into the garden, all at once, go go go! Grow, little seedlings, grow! A few weeks later you're thinking, "Um, what am I supposed to do with all of this rhubarb and zucchini?"
Today, in August, I pulled out our pea plants and re-seeded. Incredible. The spring planting had developed a white mildew, so I harvested what I could and then yanked the plants out so that I can plant the fall crop. Multiple gardening seasons. I'm still in awe.
Over the course of the summer we harvested roughly a gallon of shelling peas, after being shelled, plus more sugar snaps and snow peas than we could eat. Seriously, I took quite a few to the neighbor who shares her fruit with us. Gardeners are nothing if not generous.

Peas, Grommet! Roughly a pint of them.

The peas haven't just been about getting food, however, they've been a learning tool. The Munchkin helped me plant, helped me tend, and then helped me harvest. All right, so the planting lost her interest quickly, the tending was mostly fun because she got to play with the hose, and harvesting mostly meant that I handed her peas to munch on while I picked them. Still, it's been an activity we've both enjoyed, and I will continue sharing this with her as she grows. As someone once said, why would I explain miracles to her when I could just grow a garden and show her instead?
It was while I was picking peas a few weeks ago that I thought about all of the unrest our country has experienced lately. Overt racism has taken center stage, and it's ugly. It's a very ugly thing. I mourn the lost lives and the hatred behind these acts while not really knowing what I can do to stop it other than to be kinder, and to try to raise my child to be caring and empathetic. How many of us have looked at our children hoping that their generation doesn't have to experience this? I know I have. Yet, it feels like I'm doing so little. I have to remind myself that it's not a little thing, to raise a child who is caring. Clearly, there are a lot of people who fail at it.
After yet another shooting, weeks ago, I had a conversation with my friend Claudia. She's a cyclist, one of my mommy biking friends. She's also black.* However, her son has a white dad. Her son's hair is black, but straight. His skin is light. He doesn't, as she said, present as a black man. Already, by the age of ten, he's noticing that people treat him differently when he's with his white father than if he's with his black mother. We were talking about how important it is to discuss these issues with our kids, while at the same time wanting to shield them from the worst aspects. Obviously, by ten, her son understands that black men are being killed for, essentially, being black men in public. But she also knows that his experience of race and identity, even with a black mom, are going to be different than that of other black men. How to navigate such a large issue, one that is so important and yet so fraught with hard truths about people? It was a heavy, important, wonderful conversation.

Three sizes of peas. All were ripe, but some were
made to be bigger and others were meant to be small.

So I was thinking about it while I harvested peas. The Munchkin was messing around with the hose behind me, and I wondered how I will broach this topic when she's old enough. It will, by necessity, be different than the conversations Claudia has with her son. We are white, and have a white experience of the world. My daughter and I will never have to worry, in this country at least, that someone will automatically suspect us of being less than simply because of our skin. How do I explain this? How do I help her see the world through the experiences of those who do get labeled as 'other'? How do I show her the silliness of racism, bigotry, xenophobia?
Then I realized, I had the answer in my hands. You see, we grew three different types of peas. They were all in the same raised bed, so they cross-pollinated. Not all of them, but enough. So we started off with three types of peas, but what we harvested ended up being a wondrous variety. Some of the cross-pollinations ended up bizarre, others were made better. Bigger, sweeter peas. Since searching for peas is literally looking for green things in a sea of green, some of them got missed until way late. We ended up with snow peas which were the garden equivalent of Sloth from The Goonies--huge peas in deformed, oddly light pods. I even got some nice seed peas, by accident, because they got left on the plant so long that they cured in the sun. There were so many different peas. But, in the end, they're all peas. They were all sweet and tasty, or in the case of the seed peas, useful. And the variety, as I said, made some of them better. Some of the peas ended up huge. Some were a little silly, not like the others, but that's just the way nature is sometimes. It doesn't make them any less peas to not look just like the others do.

A regular snow pea, and one of my crazy cross-pollinated ones.

When the day comes that I have to have a conversation with the Munchkin about the awful, ugly hate that some people hold in their hearts, I will begin it in the garden. We will talk about the ways in which people have such beautiful variety as well. This applies not just to race, but to other aspects of people as well. The same neighbor who shares her fruit with us has a son who is disabled. He was born with microcephaly, among other issues. There's no distinct diagnosis for "what's wrong with him" (as she gets asked, frequently), he just is who he is.
He's also roughly the same age as my Munchkin. The more the two kids play together, the less I see his disabilities and the more I see how he is, in so many ways, just like every other kid. Though he is older, the Munchkin is already surpassing him. She will continue to pull away from him in what she can do, as he stays more toddler-like. However, at least for now, they are friends. He likes to ride his trike, to play with the hose and in his wading pool, just as my kiddo does. Seeing the two of them dropping rocks into the storm drain together, and spitting down it when they run out of pebbles, is hilarious. They play, just like any other two kids their age would. My Munchkin clearly knows that he's not like she is, but it doesn't keep her from playing with him. It's beautiful.
Beyond anything else, their play also shows me that these attitudes, racism and bigotry and even sexism, are all learned. These are not natural attitudes, so I don't have to force anything on my daughter, or really teach her not to hate others. All I have to do is foster her own natural sense that people are different, and that's okay.
If all the peas were just the same, then we wouldn't get to marvel at each and every one of them. They're all a gift, and I hope she remembers that.


*I'm never sure how to include this information about a person. Obviously it's important, both for her identity and to inform us of how she experiences the world. But it does feel like an awkward thing to point out because I feel like pointing out someone's skin color can feel like an end point. As in, that's all you need to know about them. Instead, it's just one aspect of who they are. How to say it that way, respectfully? I'm never sure.