poppies

category: fiction

I will always remember the hot summer 1976. The heat for sure was extreme and it is the main reason this summer is memorable for everyone. For me, it is quite different as I was having my first summer job doing wheat harvest in a small Neolithic farm exper- iment on the hills of Provence. The head of the farm experiment wanted to see what the life of the first farmers had been like and had found land and for years farmed it with plough pulled by donkeys and only natural excremental as fertilisers. The work was hard all through the day from sunrise till sunset to be able to harvest everything before the first summer storms which would have destroyed the harvest but I still have my eyes filled with the sun dried yellow of the wheat and the red of all those poppies which were complementing so beautifully together. For the years to come whenever I would travel through the country side during the months of harvest, my heart would always sink with sorrow when seeing those empty seas of wheat deprived of the poppies which I used to see as little red ships which I had come to love seeing so much riding on the wheat.

Years later after retiring from a long carrier as naval oficer, I decided to fill our little garden with poppies in a little patch where I would grow wheat to fill the view from our back window. I believe that in doing this I passed this passion which I now shared with my beloved wife for this impressionist view for a few weeks of the year to my kids and grand children at the very least as even the youngest one has taken the name of Poppy as his summer nickname.

Pfew, university is over and hopefully the nickname Popy which my grandad gave me years ago may now be left behind. However my heart sinks with sorrow as for the first time since I can remember things, I will not be able to go and visit my grand parents in Provence. While I'll miss them a lot, I crave for this lovely view we had from the kitchen table while eating our freshly baked bread from the homed farmed wheat. As Granddad use to call those lovely little red boats floating on the only sea he could take back with him to the hills of Provence. Arrogant, thanks to the bliss of ignorance of life that anyone who just left teenage has, I decide to grow a small replica of the farms fields and view on my balcony.

Years later I would not have gone for such an undertaking to have a wheat field on a city twentieth floor terrace. To reduce the risks, I take some earth from my grand parents farm.

My kids just mentioned out loud what I had not wants to admit to myself yet: while the yearly crop as we call it from our terrace grows well it looks like we may not even have one summer ball as the kids call the decoration that I like to see in my summer wheat. How we moved to call them summer balls echoing the christmas tree balls instead of red boats like my granddad i have lost track over time.

What I know for sure however, is that over the last years they have grown rarer and rarer but would never have considered spending a summer without seeing one from the window. The simple idea of doing a 'harvest' without having to remove some decorations' away is so unacceptable for the whole family that we decided to go for a hunt in the country side in the coming weekends to restore the balance of life on our balcony.

My granddad often told us about the the first family trip to the wild as we called it to find some summer paper balls for our balcony wheat production which we would use to make pancake on the following Mardi gras. While the first years it was fairly easy to find them and bring them back as the years passed it became incredibly dificult to find them.

While this was the main reason for me to go and become a world expert on hydroponic culture taking the science beyond what had been considered for decades the human staples necessities, I learned long after that we hadnt been the only one noticing their new rarity and that many more than me had started trying to grow them artificially to cater for the world demand from the richest people who now also wanted to see those summer decorations in their garden or, to my horror, in vases.

After years of unsuccessful attempts at applying all the science I had learned I decided to go back to the origin of this family tradition, in this farm my great-great grand father had in Provence, hoping to recognise it from one of the many summer paintings from the house and the garden view we all have in the family.

After a few months, I find the land which had been since declared unfit for habitation in an attempt to help rebuild the primal forest which stopped a few kilometres away on the slope of the Sainte Victoire mountain near the small town of Saint-Maximin. Family blessing or luck, I find a few of those still growing on a small glade which somehow is a remain of all the fields the family once had. Torn between taking them with me and leaving this last bit of untouched nature, I settle for taking earth samples with me and some seeds.

One year later I have succeeded to grow some of those seeds on the earth sample and can now start further experiments on why they have been so dificult to grow.

Another decade spent and I just cannot believe my findings. All the data now point to one single parameter: this little red sparkles which used to grow in our fields only can do so if they had been battle fields. The human blood leaves some traces in the ground which are needed for the seed to germinate. May be the english somehow knew this when they selected it as a symbols of war com- memorations and a call for peace hundreds or so years ago.

(Hollywood ending: Anyway thanks to this finding and the huge impact of this visual indicator on the mind the UN passed a further settlement for peace keeping which should prevent those wild flowers from flowering again and now we can keep them growing in tubes as we do not need another blood shade in our fields for them to come back again)

Another short story with jumps in timeline
British and remembrance poppies