She of Three

Memories of Gardening With My Grandmother
Spring to Mind

Her front yard was awash with flowers of all varieties, colors, and shapes. Tulips of every hue of the rainbow lined up in perfectly straight rows to create a kaleidoscopic border fence around the garden’s perimeter. Daffodils so yellow that you could almost feel the sun radiating from their trumpet-like petals. Bulbous hyacinths that, to my imagination, were sprigs of lavender cotton candy. Irises with spotted and striped petals reminiscent of exotic leopard and zebra print.

And in the back yard, her glorious vegetable garden. She grew her vegetables from seed, choosing the tastiest ones from the year prior from which to start seedlings. An especially sweet and juicy tomato or a cucumber that wasn’t too bitter, for example, would make the cut. Seeds were dried over the winter and, in early spring, placed in cardboard egg crates with potting soil and compost to grow.

A Sanctuary 

I spent spring and summer breaks at my grandmother’s house. Any excuse I had to visit my grandmother, I capitalized on with zeal. Hers was the home that I was born into and one to which I would return throughout my life.

Gram's house was the lighthouse beam that guided me to safety. It was my escape from the anxiety and fear that pervaded my early years. Some real — my father’s (I use that term loosely and only in a biological sense) physical and psychological abuse and threats to kills us, or DYFS coming to take my brothers and me away when it was painfully obvious that my mother’s drinking and, by design, ability to care for us, had slipped past the threshold of acceptable. Others, outlandish — like the Libyans or Russians attacking.

At Gram’s, there was no fighting and screaming or cops banging on the door. We couldn't get evicted from Gram's house. I felt guilty leaving my mother and brothers behind, fearing for their safety and well being. But I couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.

Life was calm, days rolling in and out with an unfamiliar serenity. It took a while for me to become accustomed to the quiet. Several days and nights would pass before I stopped shaking and jumping at every squeak and creak in the settling house. It was only on McKenzie Avenue that I could experience some semblance of peace.

Establishing Roots

Mary was a retired seamstress, gardener, and florist. Thus, we occupied our days gardening and sewing, cooking and baking. Together, she and I made clothes for me to wear to school. And we cooked traditional Russian/Ukrainian dishes like holopchi (stuffed cabbage), varenyky (pierogi), and machanka (mushroom and sauerkraut soup). Real stick-to-your-ribs–type food that one wouldn’t ever imagine making at the peak of summer but which Gram swore by for a number of reasons, chiefly, that hot meals cool you down. 

She ate soup, thickened with zaprashka (a roux made from butter and flour) every day during the summer. According to Gram, eating soup caused her to sweat which, in turn, caused her body’s “internal air conditioning” to kick in and cool her off. She didn’t have an air conditioner, insisting that the cross-ventilation created from the front and back doors, and all the windows, being open kept her cool. She walked around with a damp washcloth on her neck that she refreshed every hour or so, simultaneously running cold tap water over the pulse points on her wrists as if she were filling up her veins with Freon.

grievances about neighbors, people at church, her sister (my Auntie Annie), my mother. No one was safe from Mary’s judgment.

I could listen to her for hours. And listen I did. I stored my grandmother’s witty aphorisms in my brain the way she stored canned goods and toilet paper down the cellar for the winter. I loved hearing her talk about people who thought their shit don’t stink or those who crossed her to whom she matter of factly told to go shit in a hat. When I was in the throes of puberty, she told me that I had to be careful because men could smell my scent from far off, the same way a male animal can smell a female in heat. She pointed at me with an arthritic finger and told me to remember: A stiff prick has no conscience. Something I never forgot it).

In the afternoon, we tended to the gardens while our beloved bearded collie, Missi, looked on. Crouching on our hands and knees as the sun beat down mercilessly on our backs, we removed pesky weeds from the soil and created wells or reinforcing hills around root beds. Tall plants like tomatoes were secured with strips of nylon stockings and tied to metal poles for support. Gram also said the nylons prevented the metal and thus, the plants, from getting struck by lightning. Although I could never confirm that, I still do it with my own plants because, well, better safe than sorry.

Garlands of aluminum baking pans suspended from twine were hung from poles situated along the perimeter of the garden in a pattern similar to a laser security beam arrangement. Ours was also intended to keep out intruders. Any bird, squirrel, raccoon, or rabbit who dared to enter the garden was met with the unpleasant cacophony of aluminum pans crashing against one another.

When the sun went down, we watered each plant for at least ten seconds. Gram had no patience for haphazard watering. She made me count out loud to make sure the roots were nice and drenched. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. Once, I made the mistake of watering while the sun was still out, and the fit she had. Cholera shaktlafu! she said, raising her fist toward the sky. You can’t do that, Danielle! You’ll boil the plants!

Cholera shaktlafu was a phrase I’d heard my grandmother utter several times a day in response to any aggravation, no matter how minor. Don’t hold me to the spelling — it’s my attempt at a phonetic representation of what I heard, bearing in mind my grandmother’s rather unique patois. She claimed it was a slang phrase that her mother and her mother’s mother had used, one that originated in Kiev. But I always figured it was something she made up. A veiled curse, if you will. Essentially, it means that you’re wishing that someone will get cholera. Mary was a character, for sure.

Life Lessons

Gardening is hard work. But even then, I knew my grandmother’s flower and vegetable gardens didn’t require nearly as much time and attention as we devoted to them. Even neglect plants have a will to live and somehow manage to thrive. I wondered whether the same could be said for abused children.

Legacy Lives On

My grandmother lovingly cultivated her gardens until she was well into her 80s. Nary a day passed when she wasn’t bent over at a ninety-degree angle, wrist deep in earth, creating room for bulbs and seeds where space for either didn’t appear to exist. The undersides of her fingernails were perpetually black. People, familiar and strange, some on foot, others in cars, stopped in front of her flower garden to take in its singular beauty. Admirers came still, for years after she passed, when her garden was mine.

I have a home of my own where I proudly carry out the traditions that my grandmother instilled. I’m a bit of an anomaly, I suppose, and I have Gram to thank. I cook most days, using many of her recipes, especially on the holidays; lovingly grow my own vegetables and flower gardens; and sew and crochet.

Many of my grandmother’s bulbs — daffodils and tulips, hyacinths and crocuses — flourish in my flower garden. In this way, it’s like she’s still here.

When people compliment me on how beautiful my garden looks, I’m that mesmerized little girl all over again.