Today I put in a few hundred seedlings from the onion family - four fifty-foot rows, including leeks, shallots and red and white onions. Got the first little break-in sunburn of the season.
It was an appropriate day to plant onions. On Friday I found out about the death of my childhood best friend, Sara's, daughter Anna. A beautiful 23-year-old who was studying dentistry (going into the family business, as it were), I hadn't met her more than a handful of times. It was horrible news to hear. Sara and I haven't been been in each others lives for years, not since she moved up to the junior high and left me behind in sixth grade. Kicked me to the curb like dirt off her shoes. But our families went to the same church and were bound together by a web of shared experiences - childhood joys and secrets and grievances.
Dottie, Sara's mother, was for many years my personal definition of beauty. I had wanted to be as gracious and artistic (and tall) as she was, without any real hope of attaining any of those characteristics.
So the news was heart-stopping. I have a daughter, too. How would I feel if the unthinkable came to pass? Behind the profound sadness for Sara's loss, I clutched to my heart a pathetic, secret gratefulness that my daughter was okay.
As I planted these onions in the garden I knew, with the certainty that every mother has, that Sara would have changed places with Anna in a heart beat. That's how long it would have taken her to decide, the time between one beat of her heart and the next. If she could call Anna's life back and replace it with her own I know she would.
I always hated onions as a child; they were too sharp on my tongue. As an adult, I've learned to love the way their sharpness adds contrast to the foods I cook. Some may say that the sharpness of grief and loss brings greater meaning to life, spices the stew. The coward in me would gladly embrace a bland, tasteless and safe life rather than one in which a daughter could be lost.
