Bless Your Pea-Pickin' Heart

I've been searching for post ideas for two days. I found a couple, but they got away before I wrote them down. It's not that I don't have anything to write about: but I was trying to come up with something that didn't involve the kids. Life has been good lately, but not terribly varied. Basically, I do Kids.

I'm also going through my old story files, and today inspiration struck: I'll just post one of my old stories! These stories have nothing to do with my kids, because when I wrote them, A&S&D didn't exist. For that matter, Sara Jones didn't even exist: I knew Darren, but we weren't courting yet. This story is one that I wrote for my newspaper column, Tales from the Creekbank, sometime in 1999. Here's a taste of the South for y'all.

"Bless Your Pea-Pickin' Heart"
In April, we start suspecting it. In May, we’re almost certain of it. By June, there’s no disputing it. Heat and humidity, cicadas and lightning bugs, rainstorms and yellow flies and magnolias, all in a world of a thousand shades of green – Summer has arrived.

When I was younger, I didn’t depend on the calendar to tell me when summer was underway. In fact, I always thought that whoever set the “official first day of summer” at June 20 or June 21 (I suspected it was a group of stuffy scientists who wore white coats and never went swimming in the creek) wasted a good portion of the summer. In my opinion, summer started the first day that we could go swimming. Summer was in full swing the first morning we got up to go pea-picking.

Some June morning practically at the break of dawn, a parent’s voice would ring through the house: “Y’all! Get up! We’ve got peas to pick, and we have to get out there before it gets too hot to work!”

An indistinct moan or two, and an overwhelming silence from the rest of the bedrooms, suggested that we didn’t care if it got too hot before we made it to the pea patch. That, in fact, we would prefer that it did get too hot, because then there would be no need to get out of bed in the first place. Merely because we were out of bed and leaving the house about a half an hour later does not mean we’d changed our minds.

We were a ragtag crew as we walked to the field those mornings. Old T-shirts, battered hats of all types, jeans with ragged cuffs – it didn’t matter what we wore. It was impossible to dress properly for a pea-picking session. Shorts kept you cool, and also left your legs to the mercy of briars and yellow flies (which, unfortunately, have no mercy). Jeans offered more protection, and halfway down the second row of peas, they became so saturated with dew that each leg weighed an extra half-pound. Skirts were impossible to manage. You often walked three bushes down, only to find that the hem of your skirt was lingering back at the first plant, apparently talking about what they had in common and exchanging phone numbers. Socks collected water and dirt, and we often finished our picking sessions with our shoes more full of water than feet.

The worst part of it all was that none of it was a good enough excuse to leave the pea patch. Nothing short of serious illness could exempt us from pea-picking, and even then we probably had to show signs of imminent death.

When we got to the field, our grandparents and uncle always were there ahead of us. They usually had picked two or three bushels already. Each. We each took a bucket, since Grandma and Grandpa always thoughtfully provided enough for everyone. I tried to decide whether it was better to get a smaller bucket, which would fill up more quickly, or a larger one, which would hold more peas at a time. I never could decide which was better, probably because no one else gave me time to weigh all the advantages and disadvantages. “Sara, just take a stupid bucket,” was usually their advice.

Then we would start picking. Rows and rows of tangled green vines stretched before us, the long green- and purple-hulled peas waving gleefully in the warm sun. “Good morning!” they would call with malicious cheer. “You have to pick all of us today or else we’ll all die!” Whoever doubts that peas can say anything, much less with malicious cheer, has never faced an unpicked pea patch at 7:00 on a June morning.

Step. Pick. Toss in bucket. Step. Pick. Toss in bucket. I would pull off all the peas I could see, then poke gingerly among the leaves for any I couldn’t see. Vines and briars tried to hold hands with me, while various bugs and flying things busied themselves around my head. I usually didn’t spend much time looking for the peas in the inner parts of the tangles. Besides the heat, the wet, the bugs, and the dirt, there was always the thrilling possibility that someone would find, in Uncle Will’s words, “things that go slither and chomp.” We didn’t often come across a snake, although being bitten at least would have been a good excuse to leave the field.

Once we’d filled our buckets, we’d trot back down to the edge of the field and empty the buckets into big galvanized washtubs. Then we’d set to work again, filling up the buckets once more. We had to work quickly, because the early-morning cool didn’t last very long. Many mornings were very warm, and many mornings were rainy. I know because we were usually present when the two coincided. The grownups would say, “If it thunders, we’ll have to quit until the storm passes.” Of course, it never thundered, and a mere rainstorm wasn’t a good excuse to leave the field.

When the sun grew too hot, usually around 10:00, we straggled out of the field, collected all the buckets, loaded the tubs of peas onto the truck, and headed home. Once there, we’d change clothes, perhaps take a shower, then take a chair on the back porch, relax, and... shell peas.

Shelling peas was as much of a job as picking them. We’d pull our chairs into groups, with a couple of buckets to collect the hulls. Everyone took a pan or bowl and grabbed a handful of peas to start. I never could decide if it was better to get a pan, which could hold more hulls, or a bowl, which made it look like you’d done a lot more than you had. But I never had much time to devote to the decision. “Here you go, Sam,” Grandpa would advise, handing me a bowl.

My brothers and sisters and I would get bored after a while – usually about the nineteenth pea. We amused ourselves by playing Twenty Questions, word games, or taking turns reading Trivial Pursuit cards to one another. At one time we had a Bible Trivia game, but then my siblings accused me of memorizing all the answers. They were just jealous, of course. Like Cain was of Abel on Bible Trivia Card Number 177.

Three or four bushels into the day, we would get tired of all our games and start throwing peas at each other. This amused us a lot, but it didn’t amuse the grown-ups, so we had to return to Twenty Questions.

After the peas were shelled, the grown-ups would blanch and cool them and then bag them for the freezer. The rest of us would sweep off the porch, empty the hull buckets, and, if we were fortunate, head for the creek.

Pea season seemed to last three and a half years – getting up early, slogging through dirt and bugs and vines, spending hours and hours shelling and sweeping. A person might ask why we would go through such an ordeal every summer, and then plant more peas so we had it to do again the next summer.

The person who asks that has never sat down to a table with Grandma’s biscuits, iced tea, and a great big bowl of steaming-hot fresh field peas. That’s when we decided it was all worth it.

-- SJ (or, to be more accurate, SR)