Futzing around in the front garden, and a guy comments that I have a green thumb. Inordinately pleased by this, I thank him. And I hear my mother say that my grandma - my father's mother, could put a dead stick in the ground, and it would grow. But my mother claimed she could kill any plant, and had a black thumb. She struggled to keep roses from grandma's cuttings alive, but my father was careless with the lawnmower - repeatedly.
Grandma is a vague presence in my life. She predominately spoke French, with only a certain amount of broken English. This didn't bother me, so much as her always calling me June. She was not well, although she was the slowest dying person I've ever known. Every year, the family anticipated her imminent death, that she wouldn't last the winter, then the summer, then the next winter... . She was 96 when she did finally cash in.
I have an image of her, tall, large, loud, with her second husband who kept an aquarium full of marbles I deeply coveted. I was perhaps two or three years old. At some point, husband died, and she had a gall bladder operation, and her daughter moved in with her and took over. I only know this from whispered, disgusted, overheard stories. That she was too old for surgery, and never the same again. Maybe a hip broke as well. But Aunt Madeline horsed her around, got her up to the chair, then back to bed, fed her on medications mostly. "Cancer drugs" often. Strange, since there was no story of what kind of cancer she may, or more likely, didn't have. Aunt Madeline and her husband, Herbie*, lived in that old family farmhouse for many years.
They moved to a trailer at some point, Herbie died. Grandma stayed in bed more, in the back room of a trailer, the bed against the wall, so that she refused to turn over and not see out, so she developed a deformed ear on the right side. A new doctor discarded almost all the drugs, which is when the "never was any cancer" hints emerged.
I never knew grandma's cooking, or her growing magic. Never knew her as anything much more than a sick and bullied old body. But, maybe, some small part of her seeded in one of her two granddaughters. And is starting to bloom.
*A matched set of unlikable people. At least by me.
3 comments:
Ah, french futzing magic ... sometimes skips generations. You're very lucky!
No one in my close ancestry did any gardening, of any kind. My parents had a few houseplants, that's about it.
Curiously (or not) I also had a grandmother who predominately spoke French. Grandmaman was my mother's mother and she and my grandfather lived in the upstairs apartment of the house I grew up in. As such I got to see them often which was a good thing to develop my french speaking skills.
Phil,
Never learned any French from any of my family.
My father's family ran a farm, fruit and veg, or so I was told. The farm part, yes. Anything else is suspect.
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