The Seeds Our Families Carried

There are seeds that travel farther than we do. Carried in pockets and prayers, wrapped in cloth, slipped into letters.
Tiny things, easily lost—
—and yet, here they are.

My great-uncle Angelo brought a few bean seeds with him from a village near Fasano. He didn’t know their name. He only knew his mother called them “our beans.”

They grew in a red coffee tin on the back steps of his little house in New Jersey. Year after year, we ate them without thinking to ask where they came from.

Now I wonder how many stories live inside something as small as a seed.