By Katharine L. Wiegele
Dear Friend, it began.
Around the last week of April in 1944, farmers around the country received a letter from the DeKalb Ag seed company.
Twelve common kernels of corn would mean nothing to you, but the kernels in this envelope are far from being common. In fact, they are special seed kernels of a new DeKalb hybrid variety. […] Put them in safe keeping until you plant corn. This seed will produce a hybrid which neither you nor your neighbors have ever seen.
Stapled to the letter was a small envelope containing twelve seeds.
* * *
A seed is an embryo. Every farmer and gardener since the Mesopotamians chose seeds to save and replant the following year. This allowed people to stop roaming around looking for food in the wild. We passed seeds from hand to hand every year in a chain of nearly 450 generations. Parents and grandparents died, but the seeds continued. If the seed was lost, we were lost.
* * *
The DeKalb Ag seeds were special. They grew into hardier plants with higher yields, making more profits for the farmers. So farmers like my granduncles and aunts dropped their parents’ seeds and bought more of the miraculous hybrids from the company.
But the DeKalb Ag seeds were special in another way. They could not reproduce themselves. Every seed kernel from a hybrid plant is the end of the line. Only the company can make more of them.
The summer DeKalb Ag began spreading their special seeds, my mother turned 10.
* * *
In 1996, as an anthropologist in training, I went to Manila, the Philippines, to find out why each week, five million people on the edge gave a man they didn’t know all the pesos they didn’t have and all he gave them was a promise.
Their pesos were not enough for medicine or glasses or even a little adobo to go with their rice. From what was not enough, they extracted ten percent. They put that money in an envelope with a prayer, and put the envelope in a collection box. Maybe it was because they knew the money would come back to them 100-fold. Brother Mike taught them this. And to say, “I am rich, I am strong, something good is going to happen to me today!” With Brother Mike on stage, my research assistants and I joined the millions shouting this mantra at rallies that overflowed Rizal Park, the convention center lawn, and every adjacent space in Manila.
Brother Mike called it the seed-faith principle. Their tithes were miracle of seed-faith offerings. Plant your seeds with faith, he said. Expect them to yield miracle harvests daily. Full measure, packed down, and overflowing.
So people put their pesos in the hands of this real estate developer turned preacher. They turned their umbrellas upside-down to collect the miracles he said would rain down from heaven. Then they told me of job interviews and mended marriages, and when I wrote about them, I called it investing in miracles. With the seed-faith, an end to their poverty was in sight. Their longings felt tangible to me, even as their miracle harvests did not.
* * *
DeKalb Ag seed was also marketed as a poverty lifter.
* * *
I grew up in the small town in northern Illinois where those “special” DeKalb seed kernels were posted. I have always been surrounded by miles of uniform rows of DeKalb hybrid corn. I played hide-and-seek in those fields. My first job was detasseling corn for the company. I raised my children here. The rows of corn are still here.
And I am still here, in DeKalb, trying to grasp what we lost when the seeds of our grandparents slipped through our fingers.
* * *
The intricate pattern, rendered in sky blue, rose, tangerine, and peach, must have been Mary’s last and most ambitious. She chose the tiny floral prints and saturated pastels of her 1930s summers and hand-stitched the cotton hexagons into interlocking geometrical flowers, each outlined in vanilla cream. Grandmother’s Flower Garden, the pattern was called.
But that quilt never warmed anyone through any Wisconsin winter. She left it without the backing, batting, and binding. Maybe she got ill. Maybe she died suddenly. Maybe she lost heart and left it to someone else. Someone with more time.
* * *
Madeline left the dairy farm years before her mother had cut the first hexagons of fabric. Not for the convent like her sisters. For the city.
In Milwaukee she tucked the corners of other people’s sheets and glued together delicate glass parts in light bulbs at Westinghouse. Then she met a man with a striking gray streak in his hair and an accent from out east. Richard would pick her up, aproned at the kitchen counter, and whisk her into a tango. She didn’t know what to do with such glee.
Madeline was the architect of coats, suits, dresses, and enormous farmers’ breakfasts. She drew clothes patterns on newspapers, laying out panels, yokes, and casings on the burgundy wool carpet. She sold Avon and flatware and accordion lessons, outfitted ladies at Schuster’s, worked at Schlitz and Ace. But she never worked on the flower garden quilt.
Richard had the flair for flowers. Tuberous begonias sprawled generously in pink, yellow, red, and salmon along the alley fence and around the house on 39th. At his in-laws’ farm, Richard foraged watercress and mushrooms with his little girl, Mary, my mother. He named the milking cows Cassandra, Rebecca, Imogene—exotic-sounding names to his in-laws. In Milwaukee he bent sheet metal and climbed telephone poles with winter chapped hands.
Richard was already gone when I played under his latticed arbor at the house 39th. His concord grapes still reached for the sun in a wild tangle, at least for a little while, without him. Madeline, my grandma, lived on, but the summers at her parents’ farm were gone, and before long, so were the begonias and the house.
* * *
My mother’s nostalgia of the senses coursed through the raspberry cuttings she raised, through colanders of strawberries, greens, and tomatoes, watercolors, and stories. She sewed me a corduroy miniskirt in caramel, bell-bottoms in raspberry sherbet, and turned my Look Around Crissy doll into a go-go girl in baby blue suede and white boots. One Halloween she dressed me up as the Queen of Hearts, a kind of deck-of-cards fairy godmother, with a silver heart wand of tinfoil and a gown with big read hearts.
When Grandmother’s Flower Garden came down to my mother—from Mary to Madeline to Mary—she thought she might put the untouched beauty on the wall. Or maybe she would buy some batting to fill it, hand-stitch a backing onto it, turn the meticulously assembled bed of flowers into a complete quilt and lay under it. In the meantime, she thought, she’d wrap it in tissue paper, which was how I came to it when she died.
I wanted the quilt around me, the way it was meant. Maybe the star-shaped flowers would telegraph the Mary I never met. From the farm porch she would see me coming, wipe her hands on her apron, wrap her big arms around me.
I brought the quilt to a farm in southern Illinois. I asked an Amish grandma to fill it with heavy cotton batting and stitch cream-colored fabric on the back. I wanted the quilt weighty and the cotton soft and worn, cool to the touch. I wanted the security of its mass, the way quilts used to feel—heavy, not feather-light with polyester fill. It would ground me, root me in place and time.
* * *
I know my nostalgia is like the lingering last scene of a sentimental movie, an end unto itself, a frozen gaze between lovers in golden light, a framed portrait. That porch, that apron, that grandma looking down the dirt road isn’t even my memory. My grandma Madeline hung burgundy velvet curtains in her front room on 39th and filled her candy dishes with Allsorts. Besides, that way of life is gone. It can no longer feed the world, and it wasn’t easy. After all, Madeline and her sisters left the farm.
I see my great-grandmother Mary on the farm porch anyway. I know the stone steps are wide, the grass is weedy, and the thin windowpanes will ice up in winter. And I know her belly is soft when I press my cheek into her flour-dusted apron. I smell the lard from the pie crust she has just rolled out.
I cling to these secondhand, sketched memories for reasons I don’t understand. I want to linger there, resist the amnesia. I want to know what it is we are losing.
* * *
Nostalghia in Greek is a painful ache to journey back to the homeland, or maybe a longing for a past that wants to be present. Saudade in Brazilian Portuguese is a sensuous ache, “the love that lingers” for a person, a home, a homeland, a time that is gone and might never return. It lingers in the senses—fabrics on the skin, music beats felt, aromas savored. It is “a pleasure you suffer.” Saudade is a way to hold, in the senses, what is gone.
The landscape of my mother’s memories, the seeds her grandma must have rolled between her fingers in her apron pocket, her father’s lavish begonias—I can almost hold them.
* * *
When my mother died, I got what my sister and three brothers wouldn’t or couldn’t carry. They had flown, or had limited space in the U-haul. So I got the mystery liquid in a spray bottle labeled “cabinets.” I got the driveway salt with the margarine cup dipper. I got the sawdust to sweep the cement floor in the basement, the fungicide for the flowers, the rye flour, the powdered milk, the spice jar of dried lemongrass, the frozen split pea soup. Two pairs of eyeglasses and hundreds of handwritten recipe cards spattered with sauce, oil, and flour.
When we show my mother’s house to potential buyers, I take down her wall calendar, which is still on March. She was at home in hospice care for two weeks before she died on the 14th. In March she stops crossing her t’s. Her handwriting gets larger, shakier. Her appointments are crossed out and scrawled in for a different day. In the final boxes, her handwriting grows thin, the pressure light, a word or two unfinished. The last two rows for March are blank.
Months later, the house still unsold, I find the calendar stuffed in a kitchen drawer and take it home. I have just returned to my home in DeKalb after a year in Italy, and I don’t have one of my own. I turn the pages to July and hang it in my kitchen. I can use this, I think.
* * *
One day when my younger son was around six, still riding in his booster seat, we rolled to a stop at a corner we passed almost every day. A gas station had once been there but now the weeds shot up between cracks in the concrete, and the curb lay chipped and crumbled.
Why don’t they have to put it back the way it used to be, when they leave a place? he said.
I paused to think. I suppose there was nothing there before, I said.
The light changed, and we rolled forward. I looked in my rearview mirror. He was looking out at the houses passing by.
Oh, I said. You mean like the trees and the grasses that were there before?
Yeah, he said, looking out, remembering what nothing might have looked like.
Saudade lingers in the senses. But it can also be for something you never had.
* * *
As I write this, I see a cornfield through my window, dirt and snow and corn stubble. One day last fall, the dried cornstalks glowed yellow in the warm sunset. A combine chewed them up and a truck hauled away huge loads of corn kernels, leaving behind a sweet grain smell. The corn was likely destined for animal feed, ethanol, or cosmetics. The farmers themselves don’t know, and they don’t care. What matters more is the cost of inputs and the price per bushel.
The horizon line is so thin here, the landscape is all about the sky. It is the stage for all sorts of drama, clouds muscular gray one day, flaming pink the next. Sometimes it just looks like a blank piece of paper. The long months when nothing grows, from September through late spring, are an empty calendar that deprives the senses. The farmer who farms this field below this sky, the one I see from my window, must live somewhere else. If I see anything at all, it is an occasional plow, a duster, a sprayer. No farmhouse or silo appears in my window landscape.
I visit my friends who farm corn and beans and raise hogs not far from my home in DeKalb. I want to know about seeds. I want to know if they remember the seeds their grandparents carried. Ed’s family has farmed the soil in this county for generations.
Ed deals in seeds—genetically modified, patented, hybrid seeds—the so-called “conventional” kind you need to buy from the company each year. Darla tells me farmer-dealers like Ed, farmers who also sell seeds, are rare these days. “The company does most of that now,” she says. DeKalb Ag itself has long been absorbed into bigger brands—Monsanto, Pfizer, and the like. But Ed still sells DeKalb Ag seeds, partly for sentimental reasons. Darla and Ed have no garden, no heirloom seeds. This is no surprise. It’s not in the conventional farmer’s business plan. I should ask his old friend Aaron, an organic farmer up the road, Ed says.
Then he pulls up a photo on his phone. He tilts it so I can see, zooming in close. It is his father’s headstone. The company logo, the DeKalb Ag winged ear of corn, is engraved in the dark gray granite. Ed’s father sold DeKalb Ag hybrid seeds, too.
“One of a dying breed,” he says.
* * *
The chain of seeds linking generations of humans and plants extends back in a marathon of 12,000 years, much like how my mother passed her calendar to me, and I continued carrying the baton. The seed chain was broken around the time my great grandmother, Mary, left this earth with her quilt unfinished. DeKalb seed and other hybrids made an entire ecosystem of open-pollinated plants obsolete in one generation. The seed baton was dropped.
Cultivation can be defined as saving and planting seeds. We chose the sweetest, biggest, hardiest to save for next year. We swapped for different kinds. The chief watched over them, the priest blessed them.
We cut the rice seeds from the plants with a finger knife the shape of a bird, speaking softly so as not to scare the plant. We stored them in the attic with a rice god to guard them. With seeds we lived another year, another generation. If the seed was lost, we were lost.
When Johovah appeared to Abram, he said Unto thy seed I give this land. And it meant Abram and his people had a home.
* * *
In 1924, the year my grandma Madeline left the farm for Milwaukee, Charlie Gunn and Tom Roberts took the Lincoln Highway about one mile west of DeKalb, Illinois. They turned right on Nelson Road and stopped there.
They were there to plant some secret seeds.
Coincidentally, they were just three miles south of Seedling Mile, the first demo section of the first transcontinental paved road in the United States.
Charlie ran the seed program for the DeKalb County Agricultural Association, which Tom oversaw. In one photo, Charlie appears in rolled up sleeves, business slacks, and a stockman’s hat. His Marlboro man aura matches the leather jacket he sometimes wore. He squats, leather bag slung over his shoulder, between rows of dried corn stalks loaded with harvest. Holding an ample yellow ear in one hand and a notebook in the other, he tilts his head and squints at the camera.
Charlie’s job had, until now, involved driving his Model T around farms in Idaho every summer, scouting out high quality free-range seed from farmers that he could try in DeKalb. But on this spring day in 1924, Charlie and Tom wanted to try something new. They got the idea a year before at the Farm Bureau picnic in Annie’s Woods, a park named for Annie Glidden, farmer and niece to the inventor of barbed-wire. There, Henry Wallace told them of some novel experiments. Corn plants could be fertilized with their own pollen, then crossed and double-crossed with each other, he said. The US Agriculture Secretary also said that Charlie and Tom could breed a hybrid that produced more than Gunn’s best free-range seed, and resist diseases, too. Scientists were already working on the hybrid concept at government-funded Experimental Stations.
Tom and Charlie knew their board wouldn’t approve. Controlling pollen that flew freely in the wind and fertilizing—by hand—enough seed to sell sounded a bit crazy. It would take years, and the seed would be too expensive to market to farmers. But they wanted to try.
They knew that a hybrid seed, if successful, would give them proprietary control. The open-pollinated seeds Charlie had been buying from farmers, reproducing, and selling in quantity the following year were generic, in essence: any farmer could save their own seed and grow it the next year, and any seed company could do the same and become their competitor, driving the price down. In fact, Charlie and Tom had lost $50,000 the previous year when the price of alfalfa seed dropped. With hybrid seeds, they could control the supply as well as the price. Hybrids would be branded and private—in a word, exclusive.
Charlie planted his best open-pollinated seeds in the secret plot on Nelson Road. He numbered the rows with signs, and opened a new notebook. When silks and pollen emerged, he cross pollinated the plants, controlling who pollinated whom. He kept meticulous records of the pairings and how each turned out. With forty acres, the notes multiplied as the corn did.
128 R38 x M203 Good single cross.
Weak shank.
633 (B14 x 3b)(C54.2 x 70)
Female tends for barrenness. Long husk holds silks, top blasts.
Best seed parent.
After four growing seasons, moving the test plots each year to conceal what they were doing, Charlie and Tom let the board in on their secret. Scale it up, they were told. During the drought of 1934, Tom and Charlie carried buckets of water to the field every day for weeks, desperately trying to save their plants. They lost them, but thankfully saved the seed stock, and the controlled breeding continued.
And then they released the first commercially viable hybrid seed on the market, the 404A. Farmers tried the seeds in tests plots, convinced to do so by farmer-dealers with big promises, free samples, and a big marketing blitz. They found 404A out-yielded their best traditional seeds by a third, and they were hooked. There was no reason to plant anything else the following year.
With its shorter growing season, Charlie’s hybrid could grow further north, and the corn belt quickly expanded north by 200 miles. Soon, DeKalb Ag sent out enough of their field signs—the winged ear of corn—to encircle the world four times, with one each mile. They called the logo “the mortgage lifter.” With yields so high, these seeds would lift depression-era mortgages up and out of water.
Since then, it has always been about yields.
DeKalb Ag’s Highest Yield winners were photographed for the company’s Acres of Gold magazine. The 1955-56 Illinois Corn Champion, John L. Clayton, sits atop a pile of husked ears of corn in a collar and tie, creased slacks, and a jacket. He looks more like a salesman than a farmer. The pile spills cornucopia-style from the barn door. His harvest is in, and he rides it like a wave.
Henry Penning of Michigan, the 1957 National Winner, stands in a snowy field in a cap, boots, and a plaid flannel shirt. Dozens of wooden bushel baskets stuffed with husked corn encircle him like a giant coin. In each fist he grasps an ear of corn. He opens his arms up to the sky, grinning at the camera above, as if the corn had rained down from heaven.
The year the Agriculture Secretary sold Tom and Charlie on the idea of mass-producing commercially-viable hybrids, 1923, Congress quietly killed a seed program that for 84 years had sent out a wide variety of open-pollinated seeds to rural America every year, free of charge. Self-reproducing crops and trees would no longer be needed to propagate the land. Companies like DeKalb Ag would handle that from now on.
* * *
As a teen in the early 1980s, I snagged one of the better DeKalb Ag jobs, a job we called “research.” I sometimes inoculated rows of corn plants or sprinkled corn bores into their leaf crevices, but mostly I bred hybrid corn seed. We called it helping the corn have sex, or arranged marriages. It was a continuation of Charlie Gunn’s seed program. We also detasseled corn for commercial seed, a form of castration.
Corn plants have both male and female parts, the pollen and the unfertilized ovules or kernels. George Shull, a geneticist from Ohio, developed the system for breeding hybrid corn through controlled pollination in 1909. Shull created in-breds or “pure lines” by fertilizing corn with its own pollen, a process called “selfing.” The pure lines became weak after a few generations, but crossing two pure lines restored vigor. Others later crossed these single crosses with each other to create the double-cross.
Charlie Gunn used a system nearly identical to Shull’s, and we were still using it in DeKalb seventy years later. Early in the morning, when the leaves were still dewy, we covered the ear shoots before their silks emerged. I’d train my eyes two or three feet up the stalk to find them. An ear shoot appeared first as a bulge. As it grew, it separated from the stalk, allowing me to cover it with a small white shoot bag, a kind of female condom I slid into the crevice where the ear hugged the stalk.
It is important to cover the shoot before it silks out. Each silk strand is an elongated style attached to an ovule, a potential kernel. If the delicate strands emerge from the whorl of the husk’s tip, exposed, pollen floating in the air will stick to the silky styles and fertilize their seeds without prejudice. Silk emerges in close synchrony with pollen. My job was to prevent such promiscuity.
To do this, I would staple a brown paper bag over the tassel, the male part of the plant, just before the flower bloomed, to contain the pollen. I’d mark the date on the bag with a thick pencil. Days later, when the tassel shed pollen into the bag, I would give the pollen bag a good shake, free it from the tassel, then sprinkle the plant’s yellow powder onto its own silk, covering the silk quickly with the pollen bag, so as to exclude any foreign pollen contamination. This “selfing” would produce 400 to 600 identical seeds.
* * *
Charlie Gun’s obsession with genetic purity and seed quality produced the unmatched yields and the uniformity in the fields I see from my window. By 1959, hybrids covered 95% of United States corn acreage. Eventually, they replaced almost all ancestral self-reproducing crops worldwide. 90-97% of the world’s known edible plant varieties had already gone extinct by the time the US government did a seed inventory in 1983. Just disappeared from the earth.
The same year Charlie and Tom broke ground on Nelson Road, Adolph Hitler began writing Mein Kampf in prison, in which he argued that all history boils down to a struggle for living space between the races. Hybrid corn and Nazi Germany were part of the same international eugenics fad in the early 20th century. Better Baby and Fitter Family competitions at state fairs in Indiana and Louisiana predate DeKalb Ag’s Highest Yield contests. And forcibly sterilizing people predates emasculating corn stalks. In 1911 the phrase “defective germ plasm” was for humans, not seeds.
Germ plasm is the genetic material of germ cells. A germ is the part of a body capable of building new tissue. A germ is the origin of a bud, a sprout, or an offshoot. Essayist Eula Biss reminds me that we use the same word, germ, to refer to the origin of an organism, an idea, or a disease.
I don’t know who lives in Charlie Gunn’s old house now. It is a small two-story across from Clinton Rosette Middle School, where I drew diagrams of plant cells and wrote my first encyclopedia-sourced essay in cursive. I graduated from that school the same year Charlie died. He and his wife, Sigrid Niemi, share a plot of earth in Fairview Cemetery, about 20 steps from my parents’ graves.
Tom Robert’s son once remembered Charlie as a friendly guy who smiled a lot, who sometimes winked at him. But according to Tom Roberts himself, Charlie’s wink was actually a twitch.
* * *
I didn’t know where the nuts came from, or even that they were nuts. I was three years old. I was focused on what went under my front tricycle wheel or my feet—slugs, dandelions, bumps in the sidewalk. I didn’t even know about bumble bees until I stepped right on one with my bare foot. It had been sucking on a clover blossom when the mutual offence occurred.
One day, hundreds of green balls appeared on the sidewalk. They were bigger than what I could enclose in my fist. I tried to roll my front wheel over one, but it just nudged to the right. Leaning down over my handlebars, I centered my wheel behind it and tried again, but it rotated like a little basketball out from under my wheel.
Riding fast down the sidewalk made the nuts pop and ping out in all directions. Later, I pressed my thumbs hard into one, but I couldn’t squash it. I tried to dig my fingernails into its leathery skin. I pushed it to my face and inhaled its heavy spice. My fingertips turned black, and it wouldn’t come off.
Years later, somewhere else, I saw a squirrel biting off and spitting out the pungent husk of a black walnut. The shell inside had bumpy ridges. It was a long time before I put two and two together.
We left that house with the shady sidewalk before I started kindergarten. I only spent two autumns with the black walnut tree. The house has since been torn down, but tree is still there, and the sensory memories are a permanent part of my body.
Janisse Ray, memoirist of the vanishing South, points out that plants come in close contact with your body, especially as a child when you walk through brush or climb trees, or when you touch a branch or work with garden plants. You are intimate with plants in a way that you are not intimate with anything else. “To touch something is to develop a relationship that is sensory,” she writes, “one that is personal and thus private. This is not the language of botany, but of friendship.”
I wonder if my children have any friendships with a tree or a patch of weeds. Will they ever feel saudade the way I feel it for the black walnut? If sensory memories of free-loving, pollinating plants are scarce now, soon they will be gone completely. We can lament something we never had, but if we can’t miss it in our bodies, as saudade, we might forget to care.
* * *
My mother didn’t mention what kind of flowers her Grandma Mary raised. But she wrote about snow apples, northern spies, rattle apples, and duchess. I have never tasted any of these. I had never even heard their names. My great grandfather sat on the porch and pared them from a dishpan on his lap. They wrapped the keepers in paper, and sulfured the others to preserve them. My great grandparents grew oats, sweet corn, peas, and hay. They cured bacon and ham, hung beef in the attic, and canned preserves. A marsh and a brook ran through the pasture. They posed for photos on a little wooden bridge.
I don’t know when they sold the last sheep, chicken, or milking cow, when the last seed was gathered, or who cleared the yard of sheep manure to play the last game of croquet.
I only know that when Madeline left for Milwaukee, her brother Leo came home from the university in Madison with new ideas for the farm.
* * *
Between my grandmother’s farm and the cornfields of my childhood, a space lingers. My family abandoned the farm but when we looked away, something else disappeared and we don’t yet know how to miss it.
The only way I can explain what I don’t understand is to miss what I never had. It is a pleasure that I suffer, a suffering I don’t want to give up, a personal excavation of home that resists forgetting.
I know my nostalgia is a kind of luxury. DeKalb farmers remind me that there are mouths to feed. But farms like my grandmother’s, where they still exist, feed other hungers.
* * *
When I played in the field of yellow dent corn next to my house growing up, I never went in alone. Every plant and row looked the same, and the stalks grew well over your head making it impossible to see anything but what was right in front of your eyes. One day in late summer I went in with my friend Pam. The broad leaves had already dried. We tripped over dusty dirt clods and kicked over a few stalks along the way to mark our way, our own version of crooked trees. I was eight, and we were on a mission to gather some corn.
Maybe it was the Indian corn my mother had tied to the door knocker, speckled purple and red, that gave us the idea. We yanked a few ears straight down off the stalks, shucked them in the field, and returned to Pam’s patio with our arms full.
Cross-legged with a bucket between us, we worked the rows with our thumbs, stopping only to thrust our hands into the cool kernels. Maybe it was the sheer pleasure of pressing the dried kernels off the cobs and listening to them spatter like pebbles into the plastic bucket. But we wanted more. As much as possible.
As the pile of seeds grew, so did our sense of its value.
This would be antique corn someday, one of us said. We would save the seeds and become rich. We shelled with excited greed and admired our genius. At dinnertime we hid the bucket, half full, in the window well. We would bury it later in a secret location. We told no one. The corn was ours now, ours to save.
The next day, the ground was hard in Pam’s yard. We couldn’t break through it with the shovel. Would we get in trouble for digging up the grass? Would the corn rot? How could we preserve the seeds?
We didn’t know these seeds could not be ours, now or ever. They were no one’s. As hybrids, the seeds were mules, the end of the line. They might grow, but not “true” because they weren’t designed for more than one generation. How could we have known this? My mother bought seeds in packets. I have never felt the urgency of seed saving. We didn’t know that what we held in our hands were broken links of a generational chain.
* * *
We now know, my father wrote in 1991, in a book that was published the year he died. We now know that native germ plasm may be lost to hybrid plants. My father was a political scientist who became interested in bioethics near the end of his life. We now know, he wrote, that industrialized nations have taken the third world’s genetic endowment of seeds for two centuries, without paying. We now know that they have sold it back to them as private property.
Call them seeds, I want to say.
But he was writing to geneticists, I answer, and government officials. He didn’t want to sound like a tree-hugger. He believed he was speaking to power. Or maybe the impersonal scientific terms gave him a sense of control. Maybe if he wrote about genetic endowments and germ plasm, he didn’t have to say if the seed is lost, we are lost.
But I want to write about my black walnut, Mary’s peach and tangerine hexagons, weeds shooting up between cracks in the concrete, maybe because I want to hold on to what I can still feel.
* * *
On a motionless, subzero day in January, I have no choice but to take down my mother’s calendar and put up a new one. It is one of those days where the sky is white, open, blank. The sky has nothing to tell me, and I wonder why my grandparents were silent on the subject of seeds.
In late January, I go to my first seed swap at a library in the suburbs. A young woman with milky skin and long brown hair breezes by. I find out later that she home-schools her children and is into bean preservation. Janet, a docent at a restored prairie farmhouse museum, takes broom corn, garlic, and marsh mallow seeds. The seed librarian, Brandon, sells me on some tiny, cone-shaped Alpine strawberries. You can’t buy these strawberries anywhere—they don’t transport well, he tells me. But they can be hard to get started.
These might be the creamy mountain strawberries they use for gelato in southern Italy, I say. He closes his eyes for a moment and inhales, savoring the thought.
I lay out the packets on my countertop. Traveler Strain Pepper Jalapeño, Dragon Carrot, Lacinato Dinosaur Kale, Four O’Clock Flowers. I hold the 1×1 plastic zip-lock of Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherry seeds up to the window. The pale orange discs glow in the light. They are smaller than sesame seeds and smooth, like tiny yellow lentils. I feel unprepared for such responsibility.
* * *
One of my jalapeños is definitely not a jalapeño. The peppers have grown bright red, orange, purple, and green and stick straight up into the air like dancers.
When the Four O’Clocks bloom, I recognize them as the Bella di Notte that line my sister-in-law’s seaside patio every year. My kids have crushed many of their long, stick-like stems with their soccer balls.
Late in the summer, I notice what look like black peas in the center of each blossom cup.
What in the world. Big seeds?
I train my eyes. They are everywhere, waiting for collection. With my thumbnail I flick a seed from a pink blossom into my palm. It is a bumpy little grenade. The red flowers have smooth ones. The white and yellow ones are smaller and more scarce, so I’m careful with those. When my hand is full, I get a paper cup. I empty the cups into a ceramic bowl on my dining room table. They rattle like wooden beads in a way so satisfying, I can’t stop handling them.
Katharine Wiegele is an anthropologist, writer, and editor whose ethnography, Investing in Miracles, explores the pull of prosperity theology in the Philippines. She writes from northern Illinois, where her current work considers the meaning of home and the weight of inheritance.
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