Five years ago, my grandmother convinced me to raid her garden. At the time, it felt very Giving-Tree-esque—the prospect of taking something from a 95-year-old woman whose crouched posture and kyphosis was quite reminiscent of that sad, lowly stump. Not to mention, we were in the midst of a global pandemic. I was meant to be bringing her things. Toilet paper. Eggs. Butter. The latter, only if it was on sale at Aldi for less than $2.99/lb. That day, I balked and babbled at her stubborn botanical command, but no one ever won an argument with Baba.
This morning, I stood in my backyard, watering the very Rose
of Sharon I pilfered from her plot of Midwestern dirt. I watched the droplets
settle on the petals and fall from the branches, backlit by a kaleidoscope of early August sun. Last December, when she was in hospice, I promised her that I would
think of her in the summertime when her shrub burst forth in abundant,
bubble-gum-pink bloom. A feminine force—both fragility and fury coursing
through those lengthening woody stalks.
I was reminded of something I wrote after visiting her that day back in 2020. How one’s legacy is so often a reciprocal gift. And that miracles abound in the mundane.
The touch of a crepe-paper petal—I could swear is
a tender, oh-so-familiar, wrinkled cheek.
***
“It’s time to transfer
the plants,” my grandmother dictates from her porch, dressed in a housecoat,
swollen knuckles folded over the railing. Her hair is pinned back, white as
pussy willows.
She’s 95 next month. I am checking on her from a
distance, six feet between the top stair and the walkway where I stand, my palm
shielding the sun. As a WWII survivor, she is handling the pandemic better than
any of us. The isolation. The unknown. Her basement is stocked with canned goods,
jars of pickled 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, in fact, 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 and peonies, maybe a Hosta or two. Hang
a bar of Irish Spring to keep the deer away.”
“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 seventy years
beside the very house my grandfather built.
But then she continues, “It would be nice if you had some.
If I knew they might outlast me, it would be like a birthday present.”
Her jaw wavers and for the first time, I don’t argue.
Later, my children watch as I dig holes along the chain link fence and around our back
deck, tilling the soil, unearthing plump, pink worms.
We are all putting down roots, watering our legacies.
