The guys from the fire recovery service descended en masse, like beneficent locusts. They cleaned and scrubbed and shop-vacced, and after a while I couldn’t stand it — not just because of the noise and activity overwhelming my small house, but because of the still small voice that kept asking, each time they came across a wooly nest of dust or as one scrubbed the refrigerator door-edge: Why didn’t I keep this all cleaner?
To which I have no answer, other than that other things always seemed more important.
I jammed on a big hat, sprayed my arms with sunscreen, and escaped to the community garden a few blocks away. The second-degree burns on my fingers suffered in the small kitchen fire had finally healed enough for me to attack the weeds that had steadily been gaining ground on the intended seedlings, until most of the surface was covered with their stealthy runners. The ground was still a little damp from the previous day’s steady rain, and someone had thoughtfully brought in a sofa cushion to kneel on.
As I slowly cleared the area around each corn and bean plant, teaching my fingers just the right amount of pressure to pull the whole weed out instead of breaking it at ground level, leaving the root, I remembered my grandmother.
It’s probably my first memory of her. Too impatient and powerful to kneel on cushions, she leaned from the waist, slightly bent legs spread wide, fiercely attacking the nettles, clover and grass that dared encroach on her cucumber and strawberry plots. Her movements were swift. I can think of her doing nothing slowly; whether she was mixing up a bowl of dough, knitting a glove or a sweater, or weeding, she did it with machine-like purpose and speed.
I hated weeding then. Just like my son does now, I pretended I didn’t know the difference between a vegetable seedling and a baby weed, and often pulled the wrong thing. My grandmother didn’t suffer fools or errors gladly, and soon I was left to fill my time as I liked instead. As a grownup, I tried to avoid the task, well into middle age. Then I bought a house of my own and, confronted by neighbors with lovely gardens, grew to enjoy the meditative nature of the task.
I could hear grandma in my mind’s ear now, showing her love the only way she knew: by berating me.
“Look at this,” she would say. “How do you expect anything to grow here? There’s more grass than corn in your corn patch, and your peas can’t get any water with all that ragweed around.”
I was in my late teens when I last spent time with her. I resented her strict, blunt ways, and I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t soft and gentle, like other people’s grandmothers.
I think I understand her weeding now. It was a task she did all her life, and maybe sometimes it saved her. She pulled weeds in the garden of the priest whose house she kept, the family story says, when she met my grandfather. No doubt she weeded through both of the world wars. In the first, her father served at the front, with the Austrians, and in the second, her husband pretended to develop weapons for the Nazis, a potentially deadly game.
She weeded through the Stalin years, as she lost her beloved eldest son to emigration, and helped her daughters start families in conditions of breathtaking privation. She weeded as she recovered from a botched hysterectomy, helped raise her granddaughters, and as she watched her brilliant, handsome husband succumb to cancer. She weeded as she raised a skeptical eye to Prague Spring in 1968, and afterward said goodbye to a second child fleeing to America.
She died in 1981. Many years later, the scent of the peonies she left behind, lining the path of her backyard garden, brought back her memory much more powerfully than any cemetery headstone could have.
Grandma, I’m trying.
Eva Syrovy lives, teaches and gardens in Colorado Springs. She can be reached at evasyrov@msn.com.
