When I was a little girl, we lived in a rented house with a laundry stand in the back yard. Mom planted strawberries at the base of that stand and turned a broken terra cotta pot upside down in the middle of the patch of strawberries to encourage a toad to come to our garden. I used to climb the 5 or so steps up to the laundry stand and peek over the railing to see if I could spot that toad with a lovely home in the middle of a patch of strawberries. It was lost on me that we likely didn’t have a toad at the time the pot was over turned. We may not have had a toad for weeks afterward, but I was encouraged, every bit as much as our eventual toad was encouraged to be in that garden.
I don’t remember now, if I ever did find that toad for sure, but in my mind, he had a family and brought fat juicy slugs to his wife every evening at dinner time.

I learned from my mom how to be in a garden. How to plan for what will come, and how to be ready for what comes that wasn’t planned. It wasn’t until I was much older that I figured out how well that translates into life.

Mom taught me about sweet peas, too. She knew, like her mother before her, and likely her mothers mother, that planting sweet peas on Good Friday ensures a bumper crop of the tallest, most aromatic, multi-flowered stems. Even if it required the use of a pick-ax to break the frozen ground. Every year my mothers sweet peas were prolific, glorious clouds of perfection. Every year she would take bouquets to friends as hostess gifts, neighbors as friendly gestures, and family whenever she could. Every room would have a small vessel of sweet peas to brighten it, all summer long.
And although this little pearl of wisdom wasn’t really about how you should live your life, it was about living it beautifully, and with grace. And that’s the thing about sweet peas.