Rerun Wednesday -- My father's legacy

Posted by Terry McNichols
This rerun is poignant to me as my father is hoping to have surgery shortly to first check his heart and then repair the aneurysm. He is busy gathering up and packaging his nasturtium seeds, sending them to his children and grandchildren.

I wrote on Father's Day about my father's gardening prowess. Today I pulled all the nasturtiums up that I had planted, in spite of the fact that my father is now in town and will be visiting soon. I couldn't bear for him to see my dying pile of nasturtiums, covered in aphids, messy and forlorn. He will have to take my word for it, studying the pictures I produce to be sure they aren't last year's crop.
As I was about to toss the dead flowers, however, I couldn't help noticing the multitude of new seeds that I was about to discard. How could I throw them out, after all of the years of my father harvesting the seeds and packaging them into his hand-made seed packets? So I retrieved the dead flowers from the bin and painstakingly harvested the seeds for next year's crop.
My father is not well. He moves more slowly, gets tired more quickly, doesn't want to do much. I fear this may be his last visit to the Northwest. He has been recently diagnosed with an abdominal aneurysm -- a ticking time bomb his doctor said. He is in the process of waiting -- for antibiotics to take effect so that he can then make the decisions that he will need to make regarding his next options. We say goodbye, wondering if this is the last time we will see him.

I must handle the nasturtium seeds with great care. Sort them, dry them out, put them into little seed packets for future generations to plant.
(Photo from LightSpectral, shared by Flickr)

A legacy of seeds - Terry

I wrote on Father's Day about my father's gardening prowess. Today I pulled all the nasturtiums up that I had planted, in spite of the fact that my father is now in town and will be visiting soon. I couldn't bear for him to see my dying pile of nasturtiums, covered in aphids, messy and forlorn. He will have to take my word for it, studying the pictures I produce to be sure they aren't last year's crop.
As I was about to toss the dead flowers, however, I couldn't help noticing the multitude of new seeds that I was about to discard. How could I throw them out, after all of the years of my father harvesting the seeds and packaging them into his hand-made seed packets? So I retrieved the dead flowers from the bin and painstakingly harvested the seeds for next year's crop.
My father is not well. He moves more slowly, gets tired more quickly, doesn't want to do much. I fear this may be his last visit to the Northwest. He has been recently diagnosed with an abdominal aneurysm -- a ticking time bomb his doctor said. He is in the process of waiting -- for antibiotics to take effect so that he can then make the decisions that he will need to make regarding his next options. We say goodbye, wondering if this is the last time we will see him.

I must handle the nasturtium seeds with great care. Sort them, dry them out, put them into little seed packets for future generations to plant.
(Photo from LightSpectral, shared by Flickr)

Nasturtiums - Terry speaks

My father has always been a crusader for nasturtiums. He is the Johnny Appleseed of the world of nasturtiums, harvesting seeds every year and packaging them up in homemade, hand-colored seed packets and sending them off to relatives around the country. Last year my seeds only sprouted tiny little lonesome nasturtiums, but this year I have a whole mound of them starting to appear. My children, my siblings, my friends have all planted dad's seeds and we all try to remember to send him pictures of our successes and even of our failures. My father has loved flowers as long as I've known him. I recently came across a picture of myself at about 3 or 4 years old surrounded by his flowers, and didn't realize that my own love of flowers must have started at that moment. My daughter loves flowers and my two sons both garden with extreme passion and blog about it! Oh that all the things I wanted to pass down were so enduring! When my parents moved to a retirement community in Arizona, my father defied the rules and planted and tended beautiful nasturtiums for many years, until the management finally required that he stop. Is the love of flowers or gardening hard wired in the family genes? Thanks, dad, for the seed packets -- and the genes!