Why I Plant Onions

The trick to growing onions is preserving them as long as possible after harvesting them. First, as the stalks of the onions begin turning yellow, you can leave the bulbs in the ground to be fattened for another week or, at most, two weeks. After that length of time, the onions may start to decay. Mine always pull out easily.

My Onions Dried and Hanging from a Nail in My Solarium

I stack them, stalks and all, on wire racks on a porch that gets plenty of sunshine in the morning and ample breezes throughout the day. I try not to let them touch each other on the racks. Depending on weather conditions, the onions need several weeks to dry. When the stalks are completely dry, I bunch the onions in clusters of five up to eight and tie clothesline cord or twine around the stalks. Next, I hang them in bunches over nails in my solarium. Whenever I want an onion for a recipe, I snip off a fresh onion from a bunch. By hanging them, I can keep the onions almost indefinitely. I have to be watchful because, occasionally, one will begin to rot—particularly if the drying period has been unusually humid.

The onions look homey hanging from nails all around my solarium. They remind me of my Quaker ancestors who, in the pioneer days long ago, put in good stores of vegetables and fruit to last throughout the long winter months. Although I am not necessarily a student of John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet, I admire his poem entitled “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyll”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174758. If you have not read it, you are in for a treat! Composed and published just after the end of the American Civil War, the poem commemorated life on a New England farm prior to the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution. The poem has been described as nostalgic, and I can see why; but I think that “Snow-Bound” was written in an era when, for many readers, the experience of an uncluttered home life around a blazing hearth in winter was ongoing or, at least, still fresh. For me, the poem is more nearly a clear snapshot than a rosy memory distorted by the passing of time. Each day that I notice my clusters of golden onions, I think happy thoughts of my upbringing on a farm. The onions evoke the joys of gathering in my mother’s warm kitchen on a December morning.

My First Edition of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Book Entitled

The Panorama, and Other Poems, Published by the Famous

Boston Firm of Ticknor and Fields in 1856 and a Look Inside

 

Onions provided a strange chapter in my life as a writer. My first published creative writing was a prose poem entitled “The Book of the Dead,” which appeared in Artful Dodge when the journal was brand-spanking new and originated from the creative mind of its founder, Daniel Bourne, in Bloomington, Indiana (before its move to Wooster, Ohio): http://artfuldodge.sites.wooster.edu/. Just before I left Indiana University with a newly minted PhD in hand, I submitted a second prose poem to Daniel. It was entitled “Onion Liturgy.” For reasons that now escape both Daniel and me, it was never published, but both of us remembered that it was. Odd! Several months ago, I asked Daniel for a copy of the issue that had carried it, and Daniel found that the poem had escaped being printed. No wonder I could not find the issue in my library! I could have sworn that it was published, but it never was! I have lost the poem, which is probably just as well because it likely suffered from being a spin-off of “The Book of the Dead,” which, for its numerous faults, had a certain idiosyncratic charm. As I recall, my concept for “Onion Liturgy” was that philosophy is like an onion that can be peeled, layer by identical layer, until there is nothing left except the memory of replication. Profound? Hardly, but I was young.

My First Published Creative Writing in Artful Dodge in 1980

That Was Supposed to Be Followed by a Sequel Entitled “Onion Liturgy”

So when I notice my onions hanging from nails, I feel—with satisfaction and relief—that I have come a long way as a writer since the days when I was first trying my tentative hand at composing poems.