The Story of the Peas

Last week, our spare refrigerator- freezer— the one we keep in the laundry room for overflow drinks and extra frozen foods—up and died. It didn’t announce its brokenness in advance, didn’t sputter or groan a warning, just quietly quit sometime in the middle of the night like an old cat slipping away to pass away in private. I only knew something was wrong when I opened the door a few days later and caught the whiff of food gone bad.

It was 17 years old. May it rest in peace.

We’re pretty handy at fixing things around here, but after some deliberation, we declared it a lost cause and found a sale on a replacement at Lowe’s. I went into town on Friday afternoon to have a look and make the purchase. They scheduled delivery for Saturday after lunch.

So Saturday morning, I rolled up my sleeves and started cleaning out the old fridge-freezer. I gritted my teeth going through the frozen— well, unfrozen—section. It was hard not to calculate the money lost as I looked at three packs of Gulf shrimp, three big ribeye steaks I’d gotten on sale, leftover lasagna, beef stew and spaghetti I’d portioned out for lunches, boiled peanuts, pecans and more. I made several trips out into the woods behind the house, leaving spoiled offerings for the critters that share our property. The possums, raccoons and stray cats ate well Saturday night.

As I worked my way to the back of the freezer, I saw them. Two freezer bags, clear and thawed, sat pushed against the very back wall in a puddle of goo. They were the kind of bags where someone had shelled peas by hand, blanched them just so and had written a little note on the label with a marker. I picked up the first one. Brown Crowder. 7-21-92. I picked up the second. Cream 40. 7-23-92.

My legs felt weak. My throat grew a big lump.

The plastic bags contained the last two batches of peas my daddy grew and shelled before he passed away way back in the summer of 1992.

For those of you who’ve been reading my column a while, you know my father comes up often in my writing. His death was sudden, and it knocked me sideways. When he was alive, Daddy was a gardener through and through. He loved having his hands in the dirt, loved coaxing things up out of the ground. His garden was something to behold, and moreover, it brought him peace. He and Mom shelled peas while watching Braves baseball, Wheel of Fortune and reruns of westerns, tossing the shells into paper Piggly Wiggly sacks.

Long after he passed, Mom still had those peas in her big freezer in Bonaire. She held onto them. Then two summers ago, as my family cleaned out the Bonaire house, getting it ready to put on the market, I found them and packed those peas in a cooler like they were pieces of fragile crystal. I drove them home to Northwest Georgia and put them in my own freezer. I never intended to cook them. They were keepsakes for me.

Saturday morning, I stood in my laundry room holding the two bags in my hands, still and thawed, struggling to make the decision. Refreeze them and hold on to them a few more years? Or let them go—let him go?

After about three minutes of deliberation, I walked them out to the woods and scattered them in the leaves like ashes.

An hour later, two young Lowe’s delivery guys drove up the driveway with the new refrigerator and slid it into place. And that’s life—always moving forward.

Look, I know this is a weird story and that peas are a weird thing to grieve over. I realize how strange this may seem to you. But still, I sure am sad about those peas.