His tomato plants teach me how to love him, even in his absence. I have been collecting my father for years. Pieces of him. But the tomato seeds, he sent in a fold of paper, taped together like a tiny envelope with the seeds tucked in the pocket.<\/p>\n
The seeds I gave over to my husband, so he could bury them in the soil. And now I resent him for taking them from me. But he\u2019s the gardener in our house.<\/p>\n
My seeds, the ones I bought at the nursery remain in packets. Sometimes, I spill a few on my desk, just to examine their hard outer shell, the ridges and seams. I try to imagine the plant breaking out of it.<\/p>\n
I wonder, too, how much time my father has left, with the cancer growing in the soft sack they call a lung. On an anatomy chart shows that inside they have branches with sprigs at their ends.<\/p>\n
Today, one of my father’s tomato seeds sprouted, a tender leaf reaching from rich black soil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
His tomato plants teach me how to love him, even in his absence. I have been collecting my father for years. Pieces of him. But the tomato seeds, he sent in a fold of paper, taped together like a tiny envelope with the seeds tucked…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4718,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4718"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114788,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114781\/revisions\/114788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}