When I Was Young and In My Prime by Alayna Munce Page B

regular churchgoer and always ready to lend a hand, and now here I am in need of a bit of help these days myself. Not that I want to go around feeling sorry for myself, but all the same. Then I was recalling one of the letters had something to say about orphans and right then and there I dropped the shovel and went inside and went rooting around in the wastebasket until I found that letter and sure enough it turned out to be from yourself at the Covenant House, a home for runaways and homeless youths, as it states in your letter.
    I guess you can see what I’m about here. It seems to me Mr. Phipps to make good sense instead of sending money I can’t spare that I help by offering room and board to one of your young lads in exchange for some help around this place on his part. Even when my wife was able to cook I used to take a turn in the kitchen now and then, and being a male nurse after I sold the farm I have the nurse’s training which includes a course on nutrition and all the women nurses were amazed at how I could make muffins from scratch, so I am a good cook and I could offer a small weekly sum of money, which I don’t think he would find objectionable. It may not be precisely what a young man has in mind to live with an old man like myself and I am the first to admit I can be stubborn sometimes, but on the whole I don’t think it would be all bad and as I said I have plenty of work to be done around here and it’s always good for a man to work hard when he is young and in his prime, so I could probably teach him a thing or two and I expect we could get along tolerably well, two bachelors. Perhaps you should choose a quiet one, as I live a quiet life, especially now that my wife Mary Friesen is in the Home. When I owned the farm I used to get hired men every spring from the government employment office and they always were sending me the foreign ones as I speak German, Ukrainian, Russian and I can get by in Dutch as it is so similar to the Low German dialect of my Mennonite forefathers. So I am familiar with being a good boss, I was always fair, all the pickers always wanted to work the Friesen farm come harvest.  
    So if you will stop sending me your letters and send me instead one of your boys I would be much obliged. Please write soon as it would be nice to get the boy in time to help with the summer yard and garden work.
    Thanking you, I am yours truly,
    Peter Friesen    

Grandpa fell up the stairs in July and down the stairs in August.  
    For several springs now he must have planted the sugar snap peas with the awareness that it could be the last time. He loves to get the timing right. Outwit the frosts. Get the buggers in there so they’re high as his hip by early June, high as his shoulder by late June and bearing six-quart baskets every other day by the first week in July. He used to give baskets of peas to the nurses at the hospital. Now he gives them to the staff at the nursing home. He still gives them to the ladies who come to swim three times a week even though Grandma isn’t there anymore. Eat ’em raw, he says, sure! Sugarsnaps. They’re sugarsnap peas not snow peas. Sugarsnap. Go ahead. Try one.
    He orders the seeds early. I imagine he and Grandma used to sit down together with the seed catalogue on an afternoon in February, the sun coming in the back window, both of them with an utter and unconsidered faith in the coming of spring.  
    So for a while now he’s probably planted knowing it could be the last time. I imagine this brings the focus up sharp—each pea poked into its hole with his thick forefinger, the meticulous stringing of the trellis, the knots harder to fashion each year.  
    This spring too. Each pea, each knot, sharp, noticed. But maybe this year there’s also a new feeling—a heaviness, a background worry. Let’s say by the second day of planting he’s conscious of it and is trying to put his finger on the