Looking Back…

Grandma’s house – it was a refuge, an alternate reality where there was a peace, space, openness.  Our roots there were not as deep as I might have perceived as a child.  It’s where we were, as long as I knew.  At some point, my great-grandfather moved from New Haven, the landing place when they arrived by boat from Germany.  What must that have been like, to cross an ocean to an unknown place.  To create a new home – the land on Totohet Road was an anchor for a while.  The brook ran through it, forbidden to us kids, but it always called us.

The taste of raspberries calls me back there, to the delight of gathering fresh produce, warm from the sun, with my grandmother and her calming presence, those berries might end up in the jam.  Those jams lined the pantry in my great grandparents’ home. The wealth of bounty and knowledge of how to preserve the taste of summer for winter months. 

Strawberries found their way to strawberry shortcake.  I remember hulling them on the screened-in porch.  The porch overlooked the land and was a … the warmth of a wooden floor, the panorama from a three-sided screened-in porch.  The sounds of birds and insects, the smells of plants that made me feel free in a deep way. They brought peace.  A place to feel our connections to each other and the land.  I remember feeling privileged to be there in that moment with my elders.

Now it calls up a place in time when people took the time to sit on a porch to shuck corn and string beans.  The garden was my grandmother’s refuge.  She worked into her seventies, an industrial nurse at the end, having raised more children.  Part of the time alone.  The garden was a place to lose her earnest commune, with self-sufficiency, with the plants that sustained her soul and our bodies.  Her lilies that she carefully and patiently bred, the bouquets she brought twice a week to the nursing home where my great-grandmother spent her last days.

What knowledge has come down through time?  These memories may hold a key.  They take me there.  Now the meadow has been overtaken by the woods.  The trees that once obscured the front of the house has grown so much higher.