Scrawled at the top of my daily to-do list, that aspirational list I rarely complete, is “pick peas”, and the next day, “pick raspberries”.  Generally, that is the one thing I actually do. Raspberries ripe enough to drop to the ground or peas rapidly turning from sugar sweet to starchy awfulness are what it takes to get me moving. After all, I’ve waited all year for this.

Peas and raspberries, they both come with emotional baggage, the good kind. Peas were a gentle bone of contention for Wally and me; too much trouble for what you get, he’d say.

One long ago spring I wrote this:

The pea fence went up easily this year. For once the two sections of chicken wire had been left neatly rolled up, and stored at the side of the garden last summer, posts inside the rolls. We lay the wire out on the newly-tilled rows, my husband and I, and it's just long enough. "Do you need help?" he says, eyeing the sagging barnyard fence he'd been wanting to tear down.

"No, I can handle it," I lie, "you go ahead."

But to my surprise it's simple. Except for a couple of miscalculations with the sledge hammer, the poles go in straight and deep, and I bite back my martyr's whimper at the weight of the sledge. He either doesn't see my wild swings, or has become as adept as I at ignoring signals, as he doggedly works, head down, with crowbar and hammer on the pasture fence. 

I forget his abandonment of me then in the pleasure of the job and the day.

How many springs have I put in pea fence, I wonder, while cutting baling twine into foot-long pieces which I hang from my belt loop. Twenty-four, I figure, and that includes the year I was recovering from neck surgery, as well as each of the three years I had a baby in the playpen, netted against blackflies. I bend down to tie the wire to the post close to the ground, and again near the top, tossing aside a half-buried plastic sword handle, artifact of the boys' Star Wars phase. 

My pea fence has gone through many metamorphoses.  In the beginning when there was never any money I used baling twine, tied into long lengths, then strung between posts. Those were terrible fences; they always collapsed under the weight of the peas. (Here I stretch that nice, sturdy chicken wire to another post and admire its straightness.)

Then I thought we ought to use brush for peas, the advice of Helen and Scott Nearing, both cheap and environmentally correct. It took a tremendous number of six-foot alder saplings, which we'd cut in the field up the road, then drag home. One alder every four to six inches, driven into the dirt, made a good fence, but it was an awful lot of work.  It took several years, but I finally figured out that what the Nearings had that I didn't was plenty of time and no babies. 

Other gardening missteps also came through the written word; I think of the potatoes grown under hay mulch -- "the mice will eat them, they'll rot, you don't see the old-timers growing them that way," said my husband.  As usual in these arguments of what we ought to do, I prevailed. 

I don't know what happened to those potatoes, but when we pulled away the mulch that fall to harvest what Mother Earth News promised would be big, beautiful, clean potatoes there was absolutely nothing there.   

And we're still battling errant horseradish throughout the garden planted at my insistence to repel potato bugs, advice taken earnestly from Organic Gardeningmagazine.  The only thing that's ever repelled potato bugs has been my husband's thumb and forefinger, applied religiously twice a day along the rows of growing plants. He actually enjoys it.

He's never liked growing peas, but characteristic of our marriage, I plant them every year anyway. In this, the twenty-fourth spring of our garden and our life together, the pea fence is going up more smoothly; and I don't try any half-baked ideas from magazines and books whose authors know nothing of my life and its idiosyncracies. 

Instead, we move to our own rhythm, my husband and I, he tackling the hard jobs of chopping wood, earning our paycheck, and bringing our boys along, while I figure out the pea fence and try to remember where we've been.

So much for the emotional component of peas. And then there was the competition.

“Got your peas in yet?” You heard it at the post office, in passing banter – on the phone or whenever you ran into someone. Most claimed to plant their peas April 1 – through the snow? Lyford Beverage, our mailman back in the 70s, swore he’d planted peas in the fall that came up in the spring.

The goal was peas on the Fourth of July, to serve along with your own new potatoes and the salmon once caught off our very shore.

And then there are raspberries. My earliest memory is walking down a lane in Wheaton, Illinois, holding my grandfather’s hand, to pick raspberries. I was three when we moved away from Wheaton. My dad called them “razzles” and always ate them with cream and powdered sugar sprinkled on top, which I do to this day.

Peas and raspberries. There’s a vast difference between peas, which are annuals and get planted anew every spring. As soon as their pretty white flowers turn into pods full of peas (as many as 11 per pod for the Green Arrow variety I plant) and they’re picked, the messy vines dry up and are easily transported to the compost pile.

Raspberries, however, stick around. They’re perennial plants with tenacious root systems that send up new shoots every spring. The old stems, the ones that bore the fruit this summer, die off once the fruit is past, and unless you religiously clip them out at ground level in the fall or early spring, you’ll be battling them next raspberry season. Raspberries have prickers, especially the vigorous, wild variety which are covered with vicious thorns.

Picking berries that are hiding deep in the tangle of new and old stems is hazardous. You can come out bloody and covered in scratches. Furthermore, those roots send out shoots in all directions, so unless you keep the borders of your patch mowed, you’ll have them everywhere.

Our raspberry patch has never behaved, or rather, just like dealing with a troublesome teenager, I confess to not bringing it up well. I promise to get in there with clippers and sturdy gloves as soon as the last berry is picked and clean out the mess.

This is what is so gratifying about gardening. There’s always another year, another season to get it right.

And those peas that are “so much work?” A summer afternoon on the back porch with an iced tea and a lapful of peas to shell is the reward, Wally’s as much as mine. Even now, five years without him, he’s still sitting with me as we work through the basket of pea pods.

But life too can give you another season. Don, my partner of five years this August, claims he stays with me for two reasons: my asparagus and raspberries. Since I stop picking asparagus on the Fourth, it’s a good thing the raspberries are starting to ripen. And what’s my attraction to him? The tools he lends me. Oh, and his beautiful, wild shorefront with a view to the open ocean.

Soup Café on Hiatus

The weekly United Christian Church’s sponsored Soup Café will be on hiatus until sometime in the fall. The popular free lunch which gave folks a chance to get together every week drew as many as 40 people, with a steady 20 or more for several years. But like so many events that brought us all together – Common Ground Fair, festivals and parades, church services, performances and programs – Covid shut them down.

A combination of still-active Covid infections and a weird inertia has kept many of us still in a sort of lock down. Self-imposed but lock down all the same. Zoom, Facebook, email, even the phone are not good substitutes for meeting each other face to face. And masks, though they kept us safe from infection (many people have noticed they no longer get colds thanks to masks!), also keep us from seeing each other’s expressions.

We’ve got work to do to bring back easy and natural contact with one another.

Condolences

Sympathy to the family and friends of Rick Greeley who passed away suddenly a week and a half ago. Rick was a Beach Road neighbor; I didn’t really know him, but we were waving neighbors, the way we are here sometimes. My favorite memory is seeing him strolling around his yard every evening with his pet duck. I think of that often.

Three memorial services are being held this coming week:

A graveside service for Bob Collemer who died in June, will be held at Union Cemetery, Route 52, Lincolnville, Maine at 10 a.m. on Saturday, July 30. 

Also on Saturday, the family and friends of Joan Masalin Ratliff will hold a graveside service at Maplewood Cemetery at 1:30 p.m.

And on Sunday, July 31, Richard Glock’s family invites his friends to his house at 105 Beach Road, around noon, to remember him.