Wednesday, December 28, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
21
Decade-old seed sprouts new life
By Jim Cornelius
News Editor
Katie Diez decided this
year that she would finally
unbox her late father’s old
shirts and make something of
them to commemorate a life
that ended a decade ago.
Though she had never
quilted before, she decided
to cut up those old shirts and
make a quilt for her mom
and each of her siblings as a
remembrance of Bill Kruger.
In the process, she found a
tiny something that affirmed
the tenacity of life despite loss
and the passage of time.
“In February, I found a lit-
tle tomato seed on one of my
dad’s shirts and I ended up
flicking it off,” she recalled.
She regretted doing that,
thinking that she might have
been able to do something
with it. She went back and
found one more tomato seed.
Diez kept a journal through
the process, and recounted
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how difficult it was to start
cutting up her father’s shirts
— and not to use each fully.
And she recalled her joy at
getting a second chance at the
tomato seed:
“I find that I feel guilty
when I don’t use every scrap
of fabric. Almost as if I’m
wasting the animal I just shot,”
she wrote. “Planning the cuts
feels like I’m field-dressing a
deer, which is ironic — Dad
was a hunter. I found another
tomato seed. I had discarded
the first one and regretted not
trying to sprout it. I feel like I
won the lottery finding ONE
MORE seed! I’m soaking it
and will try to plant it.”
She did — and found
success.
“I’ve been nurturing it for
the past two months and it’s
now four feet tall and grow-
ing tomatoes,” she said. “And
it was in a box stuck to a shirt
for 10 years.”
The remarkable occurrence
connected her with her late
father.
“My dad was a gardener,
and it just had meaning for me
to see that,” she said.
She wanted to make a pre-
sentation of the plant along
with the quilts for Christmas,
so she kept quiet about the
origins of the plant, even
though family members had
to occasionally help her keep
the grow light on it when
Katie was otherwise occu-
pied. If they were puzzled
by her insistence on growing
a tomato plant in the winter,
they kept it to themselves.
“They’re kind of used to
me doing weird stuff, so they
didn’t ask too many ques-
tions,” she said.
Katie found nurturing the
plant a pleasant retreat from
the tumult of 2016, and it
proved a fine symbolic gift to
the family over the holiday.
She discovered that grow-
ing the plant and making the
quilts was a way of prolong-
ing her father’s story, keeping
PHOTO PROVIDED
Katie Diez nurtured a tomato plant from a seed found among her dad’s
effects, which included shirts she turned into quilts.
memories fresh and vivid she wanted to pass along.
even after the passage of a
“It’s just a neat story that
decade.
we thought we would share,”
And she felt it was a story she said.
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