One summer evening, our writers’ group meeting took place at Sally’s. She is a gourmet cook, as well as a published author, and her husband, Allen, is a master in the kitchen himself. He often prepares part of the meal served at our meetings in their home. He makes a heavenly guacamole and is willing to share his recipes. He is a real treasure for our little group. On this early evening, Allen prepared a grilled salad with his own recipe for homemade Caesar dressing. Sally made sourdough bread and a luscious three-tiered strawberry and cream dessert. Sally’s presentation of food is an art form. We look forward to her creations. She had stopped by the store for fresh strawberries and lettuce on her way home from work.

Linda and I arrived, plopped our notebooks and purses on the sofa, and went to the table. Jackie was already there.

While Allen and Sally put the finishing touches on the meal, we all chatted about our day. Then Sally told us she had a prompt for us. She and Allen exchanged amused looks, and she told us the story of the bag of lettuce she picked up at the market. Yes, the very lettuce that was part of our salad. Their story went like this:

Before Allen opened the package, he noticed money inside the bag.

“Sally”, he said, holding the bagged lettuce in the air. “Did you look at this lettuce before you bought it?”

“Duh, of course,” was her exasperated reply. “I always check for the freshest. Why? Are there brown leaves in it?”

“Not exactly, but there are some strange green things in it.”

“Bugs?” she asked as she stopped measuring the cream for whipping.

“No, more like dollars.”

“What are you talking about?” Sally turned to look closely at the bag. Sure enough, there were dollar bills in the sealed package of lettuce.

A squeal and “What the heck?” escaped her as she noticed in the sealed package of organic lettuce a twenty-dollar bill and six ones.

Thus, a prompt was born – Tell how the dollars got into the bag. After dinner, we grabbed our notebooks and began to write. (Needless to say, Sally washed the lettuce before making the salad.)

The story of Harmon Pettigrew developed as I wrote. During dessert, we shared our theories about the placement of the money. Harmon only had a couple of pages, and I knew he would need more to tell his whole story, so I continued to write after I got home. At the next meeting, I read Harmon’s story to the group.

The Almost True Story of Harmon Pettigrew and His Crop of “Lettuce”

You’ve heard of money being called lettuce.  Well, here is a true story validating the claim.

Once upon a time, around 2008, in a small town in California called Salinas, the salad bowl of America, a lettuce grower named Harmon Pettigrew decided to diversify. After the E. coli scare took his business down to practically nothing, he went into his basement and began to develop the seeds of a new enterprise. He retrieved the savings from the family bank account and worked day and night diligently for nearly two years to produce a new kind of lettuce seed, one that would ensure future profit no matter what blight might come upon the lettuce crop.

Harmon grew up on a small farm on the outskirts of Salinas. He worked in the fields harvesting lettuce from the time he was a sprout of five. His daddy taught him the fine points of how to plant Romaine and Butter lettuce from seed in shallow holes 8 inches apart in rows ten inches wide with twenty-four inches between rows. They used organic fungicides and fertilizers. Both his mother, Claudia, and his father, Earl, were flower children of the 60s. They believed world peace would eventually come about if the whole world ate organic. Harmon’s legal name was Harmony Light-of-the-World Pettigrew, but for obvious reasons, he shortened it when he was in high school. He had every intention of getting out of Salinas after high school graduation, but his father died from a heart attack the week after graduation, and his mom, who was losing her sight to a genetic disorder, needed him to keep the farm going.

Claudia prided herself on being self-sufficient but quickly realized some limitations as her eyesight made it harder to carry on the business side of the farm. That had been Earl’s job. Reading contracts and doing the accounting became challenging. She was still very capable of tending the gardens as well as house chores.

“I know you’ve been waiting to get out on your own and explore the world, Harmony, but I do need you to stay, if only for a year or two, and help stabilize the business and find a good manager for me. Dear boy, I want you to employ all your talents in ways that make you successful in life. If you could please delay for a short while, I promise I’ll save enough to give you a stake in your future.”

Harmon acquiesced to his mother’s plea.

Harmon Pettigrew was not a genius in the sense of book learning, although he went to Hartnell Community College in downtown Salinas, where he took introduction to business and introduction to computer classes. He found complex theory taxing, so he quit after the first semester and enrolled in night classes at Wayne’s College of Beauty just a few blocks from Hartnell. He figured he would acquire a backup skill in the event that a lettuce crop failed. Harmon was more of a hands-on type of learner. It was at Wayne’s where he discovered the concept of mixing chemicals and transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Mrs. Haven was one of his biggest achievements. A transformation from a seventy-year-old grieving widow to a seventy-year-old go-go girl took Harmon only a few months. He created unique hair and makeup applications with the help of chemistry and science that wowed not only the salon but the entire town. Mrs. Haven acquired a whole new outlook on life and was beset with proposals. Harmon became the favorite of the over-sixty crowd even though he only worked at Wayne’s part-time while maintaining and improving the farm. He was offered several opportunities to open his own salon, but he knew his true calling was agriculture, where he adapted his peculiar brand of genius.

After ten years of farming just as his father taught him, he decided to change the crop and grow money. He knew printing counterfeit money was illegal and would land him in jail. Using his beginning computer skills, he went online to research state and federal penalties attached to growing money and found there was no restriction, no penalty and, in fact, the concept was not even mentioned in law. He read about sheep being made in petri dishes from seed and even human babies being made in test tubes. He reasoned that if something as complicated as a baby could be made, why not money? Money is made from organic materials, so all he needed to do was take it down to basic elements and formulate a seed from which it could be reproduced.

Harmon had the perfect laboratory to work out his experiment in the basement of the family farmhouse. Earl, the hippy lettuce farmer, had grown pot as a side business. The basement was set up for growing plants.  The walls were lined with sixteen seventy-five-gallon aquariums and grow lights for each. When Earl passed away, the pot-growing business fell off. Claudia lost interest in the plants, and Harmon had never been a part of the operation. Now he had a use for the abandoned equipment.

With the aid of a few simple chemical compounds purchased at the local feed store and beauty supply and his community church teaching “…faith is the assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen” (Heb.11:1), Harmon labored to develop a seed that grew into money. He practiced with one-dollar bills, going through nearly four thousand dollars in ones, trying to reduce the money to its most basic form and then to seed.

One morning in early February, after trial and error, when he was near the end of his family fortune, he went down into the basement to check his plants. There, in the third aquarium from the east wall, he found a tightly curled one-dollar bill poking out of the soil. He almost fainted from surprise.  He was a man of faith, but it had been tested for so many months. He didn’t want to pluck it before its full growth, and he wasn’t sure if it was a single or if the seed would develop into a branched plant with many singles. He packed up twelve PB & J sandwiches and told his mom not to disturb him for the next few days while he stayed in the basement working on his new project. Claudia surmised he was starting up pot production again.

For five more days, he waited and watched, giving small amounts of plant food and water to the incubating plant as it grew and unfurled. In the early evening of the sixth day, Harmon noticed the dollar bill was beginning to wither, so he plucked it and laid it out under a clear glass plate. With a magnifying glass, he examined it both front and back, checking for any imperfections. The only thing he found was a tiny soil stain on the bottom left corner of the bill.  Other than that, it looked exactly like the one-dollar bill he had in his wallet.

For the next several months, he worked on developing five, ten and twenty-dollar bills, all the while planting and growing the lettuce crop in the field. He was able to recreate his success with one-dollar bills, but the fives and tens withered before they completely formed. The twenty-dollar bill seemed hardier but not as prolific as the ones. He successfully grew two thousand dollars within ten months and decided to take it to the bank for a final test.

Shifting his balance discretely from one leg to the other and twisting his clammy clasped fingers, Harmon asked, “Ms Hempshaw, could you please check one of the twenty-dollar bills? I have a feeling they may be counterfeit.” He breathed deeply to calm his rapid heart rate.

The teller called the bank manager from his office to support her findings. “No, Harmon, it doesn’t appear to be counterfeit. Why did you suspect it?” asked Mr. Withers.

“It was part of a cash transaction for a truckload of cabbages. I’d never done business with the guy, and I wasn’t comfortable with him. I don’t often do cash transactions.”

“It’s fine. We will accept it for deposit,” Mr. Withers nodded.

Harmon exhaled a sigh of relief. His crop was now ready for planting.

His next hurdle was to plant his seeds outside to see how they would grow in his lettuce field. He picked a small field he could manage all by himself and told his mom he was planting a prototype new lettuce, and he didn’t want her or any of their seasonal crew to work in that field.  He placed a row of money between two rows of Romaine and watched it carefully. He planted the money seeds after the lettuce was nearly ready for harvest because money grew much faster, and he wanted it to be hidden by rows of fully leafed lettuce.

The day he was to harvest his crop, he fell very ill with a twenty-four-hour flu and had to stay in bed. His mother, to be helpful and without telling him, went to his private little field to harvest the lettuce for him. Claudia, now in her early sixties, was legally blind from the degenerative eye disease but still had enough sight to do basic farm chores and keep house. Because of her diminished sight, she didn’t notice the difference between green lettuce and green dollar bills. She picked all the rows, took the lettuce to the bagging shed, washed it, bagged and sealed it for shipping with the label – Pettigrew’s Organic Lettuce – Grown the Old-Fashioned Way.

          Mystery solved.

Sally’s comment: I would never have thought of the extent of detail, background, locations, and science that would go into using the money found in a lettuce bag as Diana. Diana took this unusual ‘find’ to a level that becomes almost, almost, believable.

•             This story is in our book, Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets.