"It's time to transfer some of the plants," my grandmother dictates from her side door, dressed in a housecoat, hair pinned back.
She’s 95 next month. I am checking on her from a distance,
six feet between her top stair and the walkway where I stand, my palm shielding the sun. She, a WWII survivor, is handling this better than
any of us. Her basement is stocked with canned goods, jars of green tomatoes
and rhubarb jam. To her, rationing is not a rehearsal. She’s persevered through
worse and now has Netflix and a microwave.
“Uproot them and plant them in your own backyard,” she says
again. “They’re hardy. They’ll survive." She smiles as if conceding that I did
not inherit her same green thumb.
“But, then you won’t get to enjoy them. I don’t want to raid
your garden. Especially now, when there’s so little joy,” I protest, sticking
to our practiced script, our dialogue dance that repeats every spring just as her
perennials break through the dense April dirt.
My resistance. Her insistence.
“Take the Rose of Sharon, the jasmine bush against the
garage, a few of the Black-eyed Susans, maybe a peony or two.”
“Won’t you miss them?”
She waves her hand, a dismissive swipe as though sentimentality
serves no purpose, lacking in grit. I glance back at her garden, the plot of
land she has cared for and cultivated for the past sixty years beside the very house
my grandfather built.
But then she continues, “It would be nice if you had some of
them. If I knew they would outlast me. Consider it a birthday present.”
For the first time, I do as I’m told.
Later, my children watch me as I dig holes near our back
deck.
We are all putting down roots, watering our legacies.
