Read by Matilda Longbottom

Two years ago this month, Randy-my husband-and I bought my grandfather’s house. The house is in northern Vermont, on the shores of Lake Champlain, within spitting distance of Canada: driving north, you take the last exit before the border.

When I was a kid, all the land hereabouts was lakeside farmGrandpa raised a particularly disagreeable breed of turkeybut most of it has been sold off now for summer cottages, leaving.behind an eight-acre chunk of property shaped somewhat like a lightning-struck frog. (Grandpa did all his own surveying, with a folding foot-rule.) The land is edging back toward the wild, overgrown with water willow, sumac, purple loosestrife, red clover. A farmer up the road cuts the upper field for hay.

Grandpa has been dead for 15 years. There’s nothing left anymore of his garden.

Grandpa was born in 1896. By the time he was eight years old, he was out on his own, working for his room and board; he quit school in fifth grade. He and my grandmother, whom I never knew, got married just after World War I; they had eight children and raised five. Grandpa drove a boat and a tractorboth full speed ahead, with a relentlessly heavy hand on the throttle-but never learned to drive a car, which was probably a blessing. He fished from the boat in summer, and through the ice in winter; he hunted; he read Zane Grey novels. He liked kids and dogs.

And flowers. Grandpa grew vegetables-tomatoes and cucumbers, peas, yellow beans, cabbages, and fields of potatoes; he had an asparagus bed as well as strawberry and rhubarb patches-but the flowers were closest to his heart. There were roses and peonies, delphiniums and daisies, and, every year beneath the kitchen window, hollyhocks, but his favoritesalways- were sweet peas. I remember Grandpa, lean and leathery, in overalls an.cl undershirt, among his sweet pea trellises, honey-scented, lush with old-fashioned colors: sky-blue, lavender, white, maroon, old rose, salmon-pink, scarlet.

Sweet peas are no longer popular flowers. They had their heyday in the 19th century: The Edwardians tucked them in their buttonholes and centered them on their dinner tables. Seed catalogs still carry sweet peas, but grudgingly: If catalog space means anything, top flowers nowadays are geraniums, impatiens, marigolds, and petunias. Those aren’t the flowers, though, that our house remembers.

We didn’t garden there this year. We put in plumbing an.d electricity; tore down Grandpa’s tottering chimney; revamped the kitchen; laid new flooring; cleaned out the workshop and garage. We found ancient fishing tackle, broken oars, and toeless rubber waders, a calendar (with picture of kittens) dating to the 1950’s, a dartboard, the gutted remains of a treadle sewing machine. A postcard from someone named Albert, postmarked 1922. Six quarts of suspect pickles. A collection of rusted gardening tools. And, in a far corner, next to the scorch marks where Grandpa once had a runaway woodstove fire, dusty rolls of sticks and string. Sweet pea trellises.

This spring when we begin again, planting Grandpa’s garden, we’ll use them. ❖