Of Peas and Pods

My friend Theresa and I are chatting and shelling peas for dinner, and I’m suddenly back in Denmark the summer I was sixteen. 

I still feel it: How homesick I was as an exchange student. How I’d begged to see the world only to struggle for twelve weeks as I teetered between wanting to grow up and wanting to go home. 

Theresa talks while I think about Jutland’s windy coast, and hiking past whitewashed barns through golden millet fields. With my Danish host family, I swam in the North Sea, ferried across the Kattegat Strait to Sweden and toured Copenhagen, where the little mermaid sits small and fragile on her rock, dwarfed by passing freighters. 

I listen more closely as Theresa shares her fears about her eight-year-old daughter. Zoe has luminous, studious brown eyes and her parents’ keen intelligence. She is starting to go online. Visiting chat rooms. Following roads farther than Theresa can see. She frets about the world and Zoe’s future. 

“I want to stay ahead of her, you know? So, I got her login and password and went through every level in the site. There aren’t many protections. I just worry.”  

I think about how all of us hurtle headlong into the unknown as we let go—and let others go. I unzip a seedcase, thumb peas into one bowl and pods into another. 

~~~

We visited Odense a month after I arrived in Denmark. The trip’s excitement and novelty had faded. My throat ached from swallowing waves of homesickness that threatened to spill down my cheeks. 

In Odense, we visited Hans Christian Andersen’s childhood home, where he lived with his parents before leaving for Copenhagen, alone, when he was fourteen. Afterwards, we bought red currants to make fruit pudding. We spent that night with my Danish father’s mother and father, Farmor and Farfar. 

I understood some Danish though my vocabulary was limited—behage og tak, please and thank you, and so on. Farmor spoke no English. Farfar’s English wasn’t great.  

Farmor scrutinized me over dinner. I imagine she saw how quietly I sat at the boisterous table. I missed my family and friends tremendously. But I sensed I’d already grown up somehow and felt the tension of wanting to remain in the world but also wanting to go home. Later, Farfar showed me his piano. It was crowded with framed photos of those he loved and prayed for. He asked for my picture. 

Ja, I teared up, thinking about how my mother was probably praying for me right then. 

The next morning, I faked sick to avoid the daily outing. I retreated to the quiet bedroom, buried my head in a pillow, and cried as softly as possible. Then Farmor appeared, not fooled by my runny nose. 

She took my hand and led me outside to the emerald-green garden. She pointed to wooden clogs and a metal bucket. I clomped behind her up a muddy path where lush vines snaked up weathered trellises. 

We picked peas. Farmor was silent as tears rolled down my cheeks and plunked into the bucket. When the vines were empty, she pulled up chairs and gave me a lesson in words I couldn’t understand, in language I could. 

Break the top, string the seedcase, free the peas with a thumb. Snap one side of the pod in half and peel away the filmy membrane. She handed me one, the part I might have thrown away. Spise det, she said, and popped another into her mouth. Er godt. 

It was good—crisp and sweet. A smile rose from my heart. She returned it. Her snow-white hair swept back from her smooth face. Her warm eyes were Christmas-plate blue. Tak for det, I said. 

The next morning, she held me tightly then waved good-bye to all of us. The rest of my summer ran smoothly, and before I knew it, September was around the corner and it was time to leave. 

At Kastrup, my Danish hosts walked me to the gate, where we exchanged heartfelt hugs. I had tears in my eyes, this time because I’d learned to love them and their small Scandinavian country. It seemed too soon to go; I had so much left to learn. 

With a final good-bye, I turned down the Pan Am concourse, toward home. 

Ten hours later, Mom was waving to me from beyond Detroit Metro’s customs desk. “You look so grown-up!” She had tears in her eyes. I did, too, because I felt oddly homesick again, though this time for Denmark. There, I’d begun to let go of the girl I’d been to grow toward the woman I would become. Still, I threw myself into her arms.  

~~~

Theresa has moved on to Harry Potter. She’s reading ahead to make sure nothing disturbing lurks in the stories. I’ve lost track of Harry; my son left him and the world behind five years ago, following childhood cancer.  

“How many books are there now?” I ask.  

“Seven.” She nibbles a cracker. “Should I tell Zoe she can’t read it if it gets too … weird? What do you think?” 

I think about Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, who would rather drink poison, walk on knives, and become mute than to lose her chance at love; would rather fling herself into the sea than drive a dagger through her prince’s heart in order to return to her younger self’s form. 

Better to dissolve into foam than forgo her dreams despite the heartbreak that comes with them.  

I want to tell Theresa it’s difficult for all of us to let go. That it feels safer to look behind than ahead, to stick with the devil you know. But I stay quiet. I snap open a few more pods, thumb peas into the bowl. 

~~~

Years later, Mom told me how she’d sobbed when I left. She watched the taillights disappear into the Midwestern night as that 747 sped her oldest daughter toward people she’d never meet and places she’d never know. 

But she let me go. 

And when the time came, I let my son go—not that I had a choice. But really, do any of us? Hans Christian Andersen let his mermaid go. The mermaid let her prince go. Someday, Theresa will let Zoe go. 

It will feel like grief. She may wonder what can possibly sustain her after the letting-go, which I surmise is my friend’s real question. 

“Did you know I went to Denmark?” I say. 

I crack an empty seedcase, remove the membrane, snap it in two and offer her half. An unexpected smile rises from my heart. I think about life, how painful it can be but also how sweet, like an ordinary pea pod harvested for its own sake after the peas are gone. 

Anne Visser Ney’s writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Ruminate, and other venues. It has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize (fiction, creative nonfiction) and the Whiting Award. She currently lives and travels with her husband aboard their forty-five-foot boat. You can read about their adventures at IrishHurricane.blog.   

This essay originally appeared in the online anthology Common Ties on October 1, 2007.