That huge bag of potatoes from a membership store I love but will not give free advertising to didn’t get used up (the challenge with these bulk items) before the red potatoes started softening, sprouting, and maybe even rotting. I had vaguely understood that potatoes grow in the ground. What would happen, since it was now late spring, if I put these spoiling potatoes underground?

I researched. I was told I needed seed potatoes and warned of many evils that would afflict the potatoes if not properly treated. Bury them deep enough, space them right, do all kinds of time-honored orderly things. As a non-gardener except for the occasional what-will-happen-if-I-try-this passion project, I had no patience for all this folderol.

So I went to our compost pile (33 years old  but also not managed according to any more orderly protocol than throwing the next pile of nothing but no-meat/fat scraps on top plus occasional soil if critter action seemed evident). I chopped up the vegetation growing on the least wild left side of the  pile and dug a trench five inches deep and five-ish feet long.

I dumped the spoiling potatoes in the trench. I separated them out a little to sort of fit what the experts said but to do better would have required two trenches, too much ado.

I ended up with a row of jostling potatoes and an occasional few millimeters of soil between. Then I covered them up with the dirt/compost from the trench.

A week later I realized another few red plus some white potatoes in the refrigerator where they’re not supposed to go (so they don’t turn green and poison you with too much of the glycoalkaloid solanine) were sprouting. Okay, time to try a tad closer to recommended protocols. More trenches, but this time in a raised bed in front yard except often shaded. Instead of just throwing whole potatoes in the ground, I looked for promising eyes, cut the potatoes as per directions, and semi-reasonably spaced them.

So: the sort-of-rightly planted potatoes did sprout nice plants. But while we were on vacation deer ate lots of leaves. The plants keep regrowing but so far have only produced skinny roots.

Oh, but in the just-throw-’em-in bed: a root (actually a tuber, part of the stem but underground, I eventually learned) with this pea-sized growth on it. Red. A potato! An honest-to-God potato! I had just been planning to query “How do potatoes grow” because it seemed a murky process, whatever was going on there underground, especially since the raised-bed plants were just doing normal plant things: stems, leaves, roots.

But here. That tiny red nodule. God be praised. In this era twisting through the daily chaos and evils that make my dear once-sunny spouse Joan quote every morning the wisdom of a work colleague who regularly says “We are a failed species”: a miracle. A sign of an alternate reality. A first fruit of the inbreaking realm of the divine!

A nother eek later, after being long uninspired to write anything, it occurred to me “Potato Miracle” would be a fun piece. So I needed a photo. I went digging. Still only raised-bed roots. Compost: No cute pea potato. But then: a large-ish blueberry of a potato. Maybe the pea had grown?

I’m still not sure exactly what’s supposed to happen when. I read that over time the plants flower and wilt and die. I’m seeing a combination of what seem to be rotting stems and still-flourishing ever-larger plants. So only the coming weeks will teach me the full process.

But: I kept gently probing the earth near the maybe-once-pea-now-blueberry potato. And found more. All larger. And more. Still larger. Were they still growing? I don’t know! But I couldn’t bear to leave these first-ever-my-own-grown potatoes maybe to rot. So I gathered them and am eagerly looking forward to a meal of them this week.

A shout-out to San Francisco Mennonites Stephen and Karen Kreider Yoder, who have been doing some fine writing in the Wall Street Journal on the retirement journey. Joan is calling herself fully retired. I’m saying semi-retired because I still run Cascadia Publishing House while streamlining it. The Kreider Yoders, not too distant in age from us, keep giving wise pointers about this stage.

Much of their reporting involves the day-to-day engagements with where to live, mobility, health, downsizing,  money. One factor often implied and occasionally more explicit–as when Stephen ponders the “vacuum” as work activities are left behind–is how deeply all of us need meaning. I find this a huge issue as I make ever larger transitions from what was once a more public life to a more private existence unfolding on a smaller scale.

I’m not sure any of us can fully know the precise ingredients of the meaning we uniquely need. But I’ve been surprised and tickled to learn what potatoes can contribute. For one, they don’t care about what Jim VanderHei of Axios calls  “post-processable velocity—a speed of change exceeding the ability of any individual, company, market or government to fully absorb, understand and respond to it in real time.” Potatoes just take their time, their 60-ish to 120-ish days, no matter how crazily everything else is maybe rocketing off a cliff. 

For another, finding out that they do this mind-boggling thing of both literally turning themselves underground into something I love to eat and becoming a metaphor for what we may find when we dig through the dirt of life brings its own rich meaning, This is meaning much larger than a pea, a meaning that keeps growing as I wait to see just how many potatoes I will harvest this year and how big they will turn out to be.

That was my ending, I believed. Except while I was getting this ready to post there were some days of both rain and sun, the deer-eaten raised-bed plants kept growing, and I thought why not see what’s under there now. Lo, I found a red swelling smaller than a ladybug. But there it was. And then some marble-sized swellings. I still can’t believe this happens.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, writes on Substack and blogs at Kingsview & Co. He is trying out integrating and complementing his blogging with Substack posts.