The Winter She Grew Onions

Miranda Bell woke up on a yellow morning in October and decided she wanted to grow something that she could one day eat. But it was October. Fall was coming— no, fall was here as evidenced by the swirling leaves and the nip of frost in the morning — but she wanted to grow something. She needed to.

So Miranda rolled out of bed for the first time in two days and she looked for her laptop. It took her twelve minutes to find it and then another twenty to find the charger. Her energy was almost used up by now, but she was committed.

She had to be.

The power was turned on and she waited for the laptop to finish loading while it whirred and clicked and eventually woke up. Just like her.

She opened the internet browser and hoped she’d paid the internet bill this month. She did. Miranda couldn’t remember when she had, but she couldn’t remember a lot of things. Like when she last showered, or when she’d last spoken with her sister. Or when she last smiled.

Miranda looked at the blinking cursor in the search bar and felt like it was mocking her. Tap tap tap. Tick tick tick. Just enter something, it taunted.

She typed, “Grow vegetavles in October” and then fixed it to “Grow vegetables in October” and hit enter, and she clicked the links that screamed soothing colors surrounding life stories that had nothing to do with how to grow vegetables in October. Eventually she found a list of things to grow.

Stuff like lettuce and spinach and garlic and a handful of other options, but she stopped when she saw “onions” on the list.

Miranda loved onions when she was a kid. How weird is that? It’s okay to think it was weird because Miranda thought it was weird too. When she was a pup Miranda would devour onions, and she didn’t care how they were prepared. Give ’em to her sauteed, grilled, baked, fried, caramelized, and pickled. Hell, she’d eat the sweet ones raw if she could.

It made her breath stink like shit, but Miranda didn’t care. Not when she was a kid, at least. But the older she got the crueler the barbs became and the harder it was to ignore them, and before long she associated onions with bad breath and disgusted faces and mean jokes that only served to hurt.

Miranda was lost in reverie here. Her mind did that. It was hard for her to follow anything from start to finish, but hard thoughts were especially difficult to hold onto. They slipped through her fingers like wet sand on the beech. So she went back into her searching.

She typed “grow onions in October” and after some quick reading (Miranda didn’t have the energy to pay close attention to any one thing) realized she needed to type “grow onions in Pennsylvania in October”. Her options narrowed.

Soon enough she found a website that answered her questions and didn’t spend too much time on the writers’ backgrounds and experiences growing onions in Pennsylvania in October. It wasn’t much information to digest but it was enough that she grabbed a pen that took a few minutes of scribbling to get working. By the time it was there wasn’t much room on the back of the envelope she was writing on, but it was enough.

Miranda took a deep breath and decided her belly and her heart and her legs were wound up with some momentum. She put on clothes but didn’t shower then grabbed a handful of cash from the diminishing pile on her dresser. It had been weeks since she’d taken the bus into town but she remembered the schedule.

The bus driver smiled at her but she ignored it and the old lady who made space for her to sit, well, she smiled too, but Miranda was blind to it.

She walked to the garden center she once passed on her way to work,back when she worked at the library. Miranda bristled against contact with people and imagined what they thought about her but found a weird liberation in not giving a shit what they thought about her.

In her mind she practiced what she’d say to them, but she never got past the “Fuck you” she’d start with. It made her feel good about herself, but she wondered if that cavalier disdain was what got her stuck in the rut she was in.

Miranda was lost in an absent reverie but her feet carried her where she wanted to go.

“Ma’am, can I help you?” A friendly voice, light with spirit.

Miranda startled and stuttered, “Um, what?” She’d been lost in her head and didn’t notice the annoyingly handsome but balding and kind of fat man who spoke to her. His eyes were wrapped in a murder-of-crow’s feet and his cheeks were red and sunny even though it was October.

Miranda wanted to hate him for the joy he carried, but couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“Just thought you might want some help findin’ somethin’,” he said casually. No, cordially. His big arms were coated in wispy hair and corded in the kind of muscle you pay for with manual labor instead of a gym membership. He kept his hands on his hips.

“Ah, uh, yeah,” she eloquently replied then found her voice, “Um, I want to grow some, some onions,” her eyes went wide and she nodded her head as if the man helping her didn’t speak English, “But I don’t know where they are.”

“Oh, onions,” the man said, “Yeah, we’ve got those outside. Come on,” one of his hands waved for Miranda to follow. She noticed the back of his shirt was wet with sweat in the small of his back.

They walked through the garden center, past the customers picking through the on-sale pottery colored like Easter eggs, and then through the back door and into the outside nursery.

Miranda marveled at the insane variety of things growing in October.

She saw flowers with Dr. Seuss flower tufts colored like candy and irksomely vibrant chrysanthemums, and the funny little leaves with polka dot spots in pink and white. At the end were little plastic trays with dozens of limp leaves growing in them with tags that said “spinach” and “kale” and “lettuce”.

“Here we go, onions,” the man held his hand out towards the crate of bulbs, “These guys are six for two bucks, but the bigger ones there are a dollar each. They’re the big onions you slice up.”

Miranda was lost and her face must’ve given it away because the man’s eyes, wrapped in wrinkles, softened. He opened his mouth to speak but didn’t and measured his words, looked at Miranda with kind eyes that gave a shit. “So, my name’s Tim. I know all about onions, so if you have any questions you can just say ‘Hey Tim’ and I’ll be there in a jiffy. Fair enough?”

Miranda nodded, “Yeah, that’s fair.” She had no desire to admit she had no idea what she was doing here.

Tim smiled and nodded his head and walked about three steps before Miranda said without meaning to, “Hey, Tim?”

He wheeled around on his heel, that same stupid but cordial smile on his mug, “What’s up?”

Miranda smiled.

“I, I mean… Tim, I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing here,” she said, a bit of a chuckle in her throat but it might’ve been tears too.

Tim’s eyes softened. “That’s okay, we’ve all been there,” he stepped back to the onions.

Miranda smiled again and her lips trembled on the verge of tears and Tim pretended not to notice it. Instead, for twenty minutes he talked about what she needed to do to grow onions, the sweet kind. Big ones. He gave her what she’d need and wrote on a slip of paper how to plant them and how to harvest.

His handwriting was rushed and slanted but he looped enough letters that it was easy to figure out.

After his lesson was over he charged her full price for the soil knife and the sweet Spanish onions and the sticks to use as markers for where the onions were in her garden (she didn’t say she didn’t have a garden), the blue gardening gloves and for the six-pack of chrysanthemums she decided weren’t such an awful yellow after all.

“My name’s Miranda,” she said after the transaction. Her voice was strained, tired from the encounter but trying so hard to be strong.

Tim smiled and stuck that catcher’s-mitt-of-a-hand out and said, “Miranda, it’s been a real pleasure. Come back in the springtime and let me know how those onions worked out.”

Miranda took the bus home and didn’t smile at the driver or the other, different, old lady who shared her seat. She went outside and found a sunny spot in the backyard that wasn’t too overgrown with weeds and unuse. She tore out the grass and dug and buried the onions under an embrace of soil, then she planted the mums nicely around the onions as a perimeter.

The fall pushed itself through to a mild winter, but it was still winter, and this is important, because Miranda detests winter. The cold and the short days and the focus on family celebration (oh God she missed her family) drilled through her heart. These months were always the darkest times of her life.

But not this year. For the first time in her adult life Miranda wasn’t trapped inside of her bedroom with the shades pulled tight through the winter. Every single day she got out of bed for a special trip to look out the window at the onions growing in the back.

In the darkest days of winter she could peep through the window and see little green fingers reaching through the frozen earth and the blanket of snow.

They were undeterred. I’ve been planted, they said, and god damnit I’m gonna grow.

Miranda loved her onions even if she could barely stand to look out the window.

But. They kept her coming back, those green fingers beckoning her every day to inspect them.

In March when the sun was strong one day and the soil was soft she took the soil knife and carefully liberated the onions from their winter home. She smiled at them; they were big, fat onions, bigger than they were supposed to be.

Something happened inside of Miranda, and she took off the little blue gloves she hadn’t used since October and wiped soil free from the bulb, but not all of it. She kept some of the earth on the onion when she lifted it up and bit into the bulb.

In the span of half-a-bite Miranda was teleported back to the days when she shared fried onions with her father, bacl when he was still alive, and ordered the onion-and-cheese pierogis at Ma’s Polish Food and felt like a sophisticated adult when she did, back to when she ate the extra onions from her friend’s cafeteria tray and to the first time she fried onions perfectly and ate them fresh from the pan.

Miranda cried in the backyard. She cried hard and ugly.

An hour later and after a shower, she was back on the bus going towards town with a bunch of earth-crusted onions in her hand. They were still dirty but she didn’t care. Miranda smiled at the bus driver and at the old lady. She told them both, “I grew these onions,” and the bus driver and the old lady smiled and nodded politely.

When she got to the garden center she looked for the burly man and practically shouted, “Hey, Tim!”, then held up the bunch of onions like it was a trophy.

Tim turned towards her with a grin the size of the Grand Canyon tearing across his face. “Miranda,” he said, threw his hands up in celebration of her crop, “Way to go!”

Miranda celebrated with a smile and an excited shake of her onions. “I brought some for you,” she said, and she asked, “So, what do I grow now?”

Tim practically turned into a teddy bear.

“Oh, I’m so happy you asked,” he said. He put an arm over her shoulder and walked towards the rows of seeds.