Traveling Potatoes

I have been thinking about family, lately.

Once, I thought of family in the same way I thought about a potato patch: somebody planted it, and you got more potatoes. When you grew up, and it was your turn, you planted a few potatoes, yourself. All of us potatoes looked pretty much alike, acted alike, and had the same dimples and wrinkles. Other people recognized us as having come from the same patch.

Dad's oldest brother, Ola, from Norway, was impressed with our potatoes; not the family, so much, but with the Idaho potatoes. He smuggled a few back to Norway, and planted them. In the thin, cold soil on the island, they looked pretty much like Norwegian potatoes. It had something to do, I guess, with the nutrients of that soil, and the lack of sun.

Those were not the only potatoes in our family to go traveling. I am one of them. The potato patch I am in now does not look so much like what I remember. A lot of my family does not even look like Norwegian potatoes. Marcia is African by way of South America. Michael is Thai. Daniel is tall and thin and more of a beanstalk than a potato. Paul and Kathryn and Gail and Heidi are at least half-Germanic something. Mari is a Norwegian potato nurtured by two fathoms of Iowa topsoil. And all the while, marriage, and partners, and wind-blown flowers are tumbling into the spaces around and between us.

We are becoming a whole garden, and I like it better, this way, with Mari-golds and beanstalks and carrot-tops and peppers. I am still pretty much a potato, myself, but cannot imagine ever again wanting to be back in the garden from which I wandered, or was cast, out. An avenging angel has shut the gate behind me, and thrown apples at me. I do not want to go back, because there are other gardens. I am still a potato, and I do not mind being a potato, but I like the peppers and the flowers where I am.

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