Yesterday I got a text from my neighbor inviting me to cut her roses, which were splaying over her front walkway and getting entirely out of hand. So now two pots on the mantle are filled with these old-fashioned cluster roses--nearly scentless but sturdy and gloriously prolific. It's a long-established bush, possibly planted when the house was built in the 1920s, and the roses have an antiquated quality, like the old-lady lipstick from my childhood. But they are beautiful also, and I feel rich in blossoms this morning, as the rattling rain blotches my weekend to-do list. I'd intended to mow grass this morning, to catch up on weeding, to rescue some of the plants that had been flattened by Thursday's thunderstorm. Instead, I am watching a steady downpour and readjusting my expectations.

Well, that's fine. Cool weather has returned to Maine, the weekend stretches before me . . . At some point, among the drops, I'll pick our first batch of peas. This is one good side-effect of moving the teaching conference into July: I won't miss the pea crop. Every year, for more than a decade, Tom would spend a week gorging on infant peas while I vicariously enjoyed them via midnight phone calls. (The exception was the Covid-era conferences, when I had to be on zoom all day and into the night while also picking and cooking peas. As a result, I barely remember what they tasted like. A travesty.)

When I was a kid, I hated peas passionately. Out at the western Pennsylvania farm my grandfather grew rows and rows of them, and my sister and I shelled bushels and bushels of them, and my mother canned quarts and quarts of them, and I despised them. The peas were always swollen and starchy--horrible fresh and worse canned--and I choked them down despairingly. Once I was finally in charge of my own meals, I avoided peas at all cost.

And then, in my 20s, I read M. F. K. Fisher's culinary writings as well as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, an eccentric and affectionate little treatise on what it was like to be Gertrude Stein's sidekick (written by Stein, which of course adds many layers of what?). The best parts of that book involve Alice's ramblings through kitchen gardens. For the first time I learned that gardens didn't have to be production machines. They could be late-afternoon saunters with a basket. What might we eat tonight? The cook affectionately caresses each pea pod, searching for the tiny swellings that promise the sweetest sugar. She finds a green onion, a bouquet of tender lettuce, a fistful of parsley. She sits on a shady chair under a spreading tree to shell the peas. In the kitchen she lays ribbons of lettuce in the bottom of a saucepan, then scissors in the green onion and the parsley. On top, she tips a mound of delicate peas--tiny, fragile, brilliantly green. A pat of butter, a splash of water, a pinch of coarse salt; then heat quickly to a simmer, just until the lettuce begins to wilt, and ladle onto plates. Petit pois à la française. The food of Eden. Impossible to replicate in a restaurant. Nearly impossible to replicate for more than four diners. It requires an afternoon stroll; it requires shelling the peas just before cooking so there is no opportunity for the starches to develop. Everything must fall into place: the saunter, the timing of the peas' ripening, a dining partner who shares the cook's pleasure in the simplicity of perfection.

These writers changed all of my ideas about kitchen gardening. They strolled among the vegetables like a lover, they prepared their meals like a lover, they presented them to their loves like a lover. That, I learned, is the garden I want to grow.