planting seeds

because it's bean season

I’m sending out a longer essay I wrote last year, and just recently recorded as an audio piece so that is here as well. Let me know what you think of the audio version— I am super interested in this format for story telling.

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Beatrice did not break eye contact. She, like many of them, had not learned social cues about personal space and she stood as close to me as she could. I was seated criss-cross-apple-sauce. “I love you, Teacher Nina,” she spoke in nearly a whisper. I expected this is what she would say, just as Emmett had said it before her. In fact, every one of the twenty preschoolers who were sitting in this circle on the rug around me were in the process of telling me that they loved me, or saying something else kind, as a farewell on my last day as their classroom teacher. These four and five-year-olds had learned a lot in the past year— how to lay out their mats and bedding at 12:15pm every day, how to carry sandwich crusts to the compost bin and yogurt cups to the trash. They had learned to set up boundaries with one another, how to almost always put their shoes on the correct feet, how to tattle. I had helped guide along this process, and today was the last day I would spend with them. My co-teacher Amy had gathered the children together on the circle carpet and brought out a bag of dry black beans and placed it in the center of our circle. All year we had been learning about kind communication, about using our words to “fill the cup” of our friend as opposed to emptying it. This was a metaphor the kids understood and now Teacher Amy was bringing it to life. She gave me an empty jar to hold, and we all sat in a circle on the big classroom rug.

“Today is Teacher Nina’s last day with our class,” Teacher Amy began. The children fidgeted as usual, their small animal bodies unaccustomed to the constraints of circle-sitting. There were minor lapses in stillness, like Aidan hitting Wes who pretended to cry, Zoe lying down and singing to herself, or Clio whisper-asking if she could sit on my lap. These were normal features of circle time in a preschool classroom. Amy tolerated a certain amount of wiggling and she went on. “Before she goes, we are all going to say goodbye to her by filling her cup. When it is your turn, take a handful of beans from the jar in the middle of the circle and put it in Teacher Nina’s cup. Tell her something nice that you like about her.”

This is how I came face-to-face with each of them. The kids understood, for the most part, and the older kids even came up with something to tell me besides ‘I love you.’ With each turn, a child who I had spent my days with over the course of the last year would bring me a tiny handful of beans and some kind words. I had spent every hour of my work week in their presence for a year, and I felt as if I knew them deeper than I knew most of my friends. Maggie could only go to sleep at nap time if I patted her back, and she liked to sit up awake as soon as I walked away. Emmett’s favorite book was I Spy and we would sit up in the loft during playtime and look at pages together. Wes and Ollie were best friends who underwent a dramatic breakup and reunion every recess. Ariel once kissed me on the cheek while I was reading to her. Zoe, the youngest, threw a tantrum almost every day but exuded joy more ferociously than any other child. I could tell infinite stories about these children and here I was saying goodbye to them, each taking their turn to hand me off a few beans for the future.

As I got off work that afternoon, I cleared out my staff cubby in the break room. I packed the remaining few mementos the children had given me— a crystal from Maggie, a drawing from Rachel, my jar of beans— into my bike pannier and headed outside to my bicycle. Riding down Northeast Senate street with one headphone in my ear, I answered a call from my boyfriend. He asked how my last day at the preschool had gone. “It was actually really, really good,” I told him, surprised to hear myself saying it. Over the course of the past year, this job had felt anything but easy. I deeply loved the children with whom I worked, but I was making eleven dollars per hour in a rapidly gentrifying city. I commuted only by bike and I worked long hours far from home. With summer approaching, I had quit the preschool to accept a seasonal position at a nature camp for kids. After that, my plan was to travel and work on farms abroad with my boyfriend. He was already headed to east Africa for the summer and I intended to meet him there in a few months.

“I feel an immense amount of gratitude, which is strange considering what a struggle this job has been. I’ll miss the kids so much, and yet I’m at peace with leaving and moving on.” It was true. Turning onto 41st, I felt light. Every memory of a teary-eyed toddler’s bodily fluid seemed to be replaced by a powerful love. I had just had the opportunity to be part of these young humans’ lives for a whole year, and at that moment of riding away, I was heading toward a different future.

When I got home, I placed the jar of beans on my bedside table. Summer rolled on and my job at the nature camp turned out to be pretty challenging as well. Meeting and teaching different groups of kids each week was exhausting, and I missed the relationships I had built in my preschool classroom. The beans on my bedside table were a reminder of the love I had felt for those small people, of the care instinct that had so easily come out of me when presented with babies to tend. 

At the end of the summer, I moved out of my house. I’d bought an old truck, and I piled all my belongings into it as I left my house on Woodstock street. I nestled the jar of beans safely in a labeled box and drove south to California. Visiting friends along the way, I would take out the jar of beans and explain about the children. I loved sharing stories about Emmett, Casey, Maxine, Ruth, and the other kids at the preschool. When I spent a month at an artist residency near the Bay Area, I put the beans on my desk next to my sketchbook and paints. The jar came with me back to my parents’ house after that.

In the spring, I was devastated. I had not, as it turned out, gone traveling with my boyfriend. The relationship had painfully split apart and I was suddenly drowning inside a deep grief that pushed me out of my parents’ house to try and make sense of myself and everything that had happened. I packed my bags to move to a very rural farm on the far north coast of California, where I intended to do some self reflection and spend time with the land. I had been wanting to learn about sustainable agriculture and I needed a place to think things through, and to spend some time with my broken heart. I knew that something about tending plants would feel healing, and there was a river there, so I loaded the truck and drove north along the ocean. The beans from the preschoolers came with me in their glass flip-top jar, tucked away in a moving box. I arrived just as a flood was receding from the fertile valley of the farm and I found myself unpacking my personal belongings into a freshly-mucked out cabin with a clear roof. Like a greenhouse, the farmhand cabin where I slept that year heated intensely each day and, and I woke each morning to the light streaming in, bleaching the spines of all my books. The jar of beans sat on top of my bookshelf in that hot little room, next to the wood burning stove and books about meditation. From spring until late fall, I slept in that cabin and let my heart break. The jar of beans served as a witness.

As the season on the farm came to a close, I was approaching another transition. Out of luck or perhaps grace, I found a job closer to where I grew up and decided to relocate south. I put everything from inside the clear-roofed cabin in boxes and left. Within a few weeks, I found housing with some new roommates nearby the educational farm where I would work and all the elements seemed to fall into place. It was like the perfect pairing— my love of children and my interest in sustainable agriculture. I unpacked boxes in my new home in early spring of 2020, and the news about Covid was everywhere. Within a week I was sheltering-in-place with my new housemates.

I spent so much time at home that year. I can tell you exactly where the jar of beans sat on my black bookshelf, a ring of dust developing around it. When I had to evacuate a few months later, as orange flames crested the hill above my new house and the farm where I work, I packed the jar of beans into a box and loaded it into the back of my truck. The fire burned most homes in the neighborhood, and the community I had just started to build dissipated after many of my new neighbors moved away. In those quiet months after the fire, when everything was black or white with chalky ash, I made the decision to stay. The farm was different after the fire, but I was so tired of moving. I wanted to stayed in the same place, to find some kind of rootedness.

In those months after the fire, I began to think about the beans. Life felt so far away from the children at the preschool. Mid-pandemic, the youngest of them were entering second grade. Did they do first grade virtually or in masks? Were they suffering in the isolated, plague-ridden world? Did they remember the time before, when we laughed together eating lunch, all of our knees touching under the tiny table? I remembered them. I remembered the love I had for those children and the tiny flame in my heart that wants to have children of my own someday.

So I cracked open the jar of beans. I had opened it a few times before when I noticed moisture accumulating, but now I had a project in mind. First, I would need to assess the viability of the beans to germinate, for they were certainly, at this point, light damaged and very old. It had been three years since the children sprinkled them by the palmful into the jar, and who knows how old they were then. But I was going to try. After three years away from the preschool and two seasons of farming, I was going to plant these seeds.

In one of the more horrific moments of my extended breakup, my ex-boyfriend told me that I had ripped our relationship out of the ground the way one would rip plants out of a garden. The image burned itself into my mind, and I spent the years afterward tormenting myself with it. I had become, in my mind’s eye, a destroyer of life, of growth and possibility. What would it mean now to plant these seeds that had been given to me in a moment of love from a child? I needed to break the spell of disaster that the breakup had branded upon me. I needed to mother something.

My germination test would take place in a 200 cell seed tray. Each cell got some potting soil, two beans (in case one did not germinate), water, and a whole lot of warm spring sun. I placed my seed tray in the greenhouse by the apple tree and began to tend it. I also had other seeds beginning, some herbs and flowers for my garden. Each afternoon, I would wander over to the greenhouse to check on my beans and other seed trays. Over the next few weeks, the marigolds, snapdragons, tulsi, and sweet peas began to sprout up from their seed trays. I waited to see what would happen with the beans. My treasured seeds from the preschoolers remained dormant until one day, I came in and saw one sprout! Only one of the 400 beans had germinated, but I was delighted. I watched the two cotyledons unfurl from the tiny shoot, each day growing stronger.

Then, a mouse came in the night and ate the sprout. This was a sad setback. However, it was only May and I tried the next round of planting outside directly into my garden bed. I planted a long line of black beans from the jar, spaced a little too close together, and began the process over again. In the time since I had decided to try and grow these beans, an idea had begun to take root in my mind that gave these little beans greater importance than before. In the brand new world of post-pandemic, there is much to be grieved and much to long for and it is only human to try and make sense of this uncertainty. How do we navigate our own massively unknowable futures? I know that I love children, and I’d love to have some of my own someday, but the details are uncertain.

So if these bulk-bins, sun-soaked, years-old beans could possibly grow into stringy plants of their own, then why couldn’t I someday hold a child of my own? I imagined, and perhaps it’s only a made-up ritual born of loneliness, that if I could grow these beans, and they made more beans, then there would be possibilities in the future. For years ahead, I could grow out seeds these bean plants would produce. I could mail a jar to Teacher Amy, or make a pot of chili to serve to the community that waited for me on the other side of this lonely time. I was deep in the bean dream.

Of the row of fifty seeds I planted in my garden, two sprouted. They seemed much happier than that single sprout in the greenhouse, perhaps because of the time of year or the fact that they were outside in the wild winds of the coast, fresh and full of sunlight. I planted other bean varieties around them, heirlooms like Tiger’s Eye and Hidatsa Red and some Petaluma Gold Rush that I got from a friend. The other varieties were happy and strong, and they reached up toward the sun fervently. They soon outgrew my two little black bean sprouts and I noticed that my tiny sprouts were struggling. In an effort to prevent both shaded sprouts from reaching the same fate, I transplanted one of my black bean plants to a pot and set it in full sun. That way, if the transplant damaged the plant I would still have the one in the bed, and if the bed was too shaded, I still had the transplant.

Summer months rolled on. I spent my time with new friends, visited the ocean, worked a lot. Each day, when I came home, I would check on the beans. Though water was scarce on the farm where I live, I managed to water my plants a few times a week. I was glad to see that my heirloom bean varieties were growing, but even more so to see that the black bean plant in the pot seemed happy. It had developed flowers, and soon those flowers turned to pods. By the time the autumn arrived, those pods had dried and hardened. One day, I cracked one open and four little black beans fell out. They looked just like the beans Beatrice had dropped into the jar in my lap three years ago. Of course they did, because they were. Her expression of love had grown into four brand new beans, born into the world that very day.

Over the next week, I harvested a total of about twenty beans from my potted plant. It felt human to make a ritual of the bean planting, to assign meaning to it, to find peace and joy and something like an answered prayer in the plant’s fruiting. I think we all need that, and I have looked for it in many places over the last year, but the garden bed feels like a natural ground for making wishes, for tending something tender that we hope may one day grow.

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Epilogue: I replanted last year’s seeds in my garden this year, and 95% of them were eaten by mice. But some made it— I have about 6 viable pods that I’m waiting to dry before I harvest, so the story continues… yay!