Sunday dispatch: joys and discoveries this week

Pie, seeds, teenage girls, and more

Making salted lemon cream pie.

Earlier this week, on a beautiful sunny day, I was sitting on the front porch step with a big sack of potting soil and five crisp paper packets of seeds, and Elena was taking an end-of-unit literacy test about ancient civilizations.

I rattled the little packet of strawflowers, gently unstuck the glued seal, and delighted at the absurd tininess of the seeds within: how each would generate (maybe, hopefully?) a whole thrilling plant, just like the million (MILLION!) eggs in a woman’s ovum each has the potential to grow into a giant, long-limbed, cake-eating human relentlessly demanding you jump with her on a trampoline.

Elena was whining. She’d had a long day of outdoor play and activity, and I was trying to cram this geography work in before swimming. At first, I was frustrated. But then, when I sat down and read the question she was struggling with, I realized it was silly.

“Just leave it,” I said. “Let’s do seeds.”

She came over and sat beside me and I shook a strawflower seed into her hand.

“Place it really gently on top of the soil, then cover it,” I told her. She did it with the infinite tenderness of small children. I coaxed more seeds into my palm and she took them, one by one, silently nesting each into its moist bed.

Why do geography worksheets and facts and tests somehow seem more real than this: a seed in the earth that blooms into a plant; the most fundamental, life-sustaining basis of existence?

We made three egg cartons of seeds: strawflowers, globe amaranth, and snapdragons. We carried them up, cleared her desk of all its sundry Very Important kid detritus (“DON’T TOUCH THAT!” she screamed of an empty Tic-Tac box, a Barbie shoe the size of my pinky nail, a craggy pebble), and set the seeds in front of the window.

That was it. Enough. One thing I’ve learned from Julie Bogart’s Instagram (highly recommended account if you don’t follow her already – @juliebravewriter) and from John Holt’s book How Children Learn is that it’s so easy for adults to get carried away “professionalizing” children’s interests.