Peaches and Petunias

THE POWER OF PEACHES AND PETUNIAS

by Karen Brown

On summer evenings I smell my petunias, those earthy, musky flowers that remind me of her, and ache for her to come back and be my grandma again. I stayed with her often. When I was little, a week’s visit at her house in town was part of my summer vacation. We worked in her garden during the day, then after supper we sat under the shade trees drinking iced tea out of Mason jars, watching the long summer evenings fade into night.

If pressed to remember what we talked about, I could not say. But we passed the time in pleasant contemplation, noting the comings and goings of neighbors, the sights and sounds of a small town settling down for the night. If we planned to wash windows the next day, I knew that she would call a neighbor and ask to borrow her step ladder and that I would be sent to fetch it and take it back when we were finished.

Sunday mornings and some Wednesday evenings Grandma went to church, often wearing a lacy lavender blouse and plaid skirt. I thought she looked especially pretty in lavender–and years later I discovered that my coloring, too, found lavender complimentary. I liked that, and the fact that I favored, physically and emotionally, her side of the family.

In those days of no television and poor radio reception people, especially relatives, found entertainment in visiting each other. Normally, I squirmed and fidgeted through visits with adult relatives. My tomboy instincts wanted me outside pretending to be Black Beauty or Trigger, but Daddy had some notion that sitting in a room filled with our soporific relatives would make a young lady of me. Some of these relatives appeared to me to be at once victims of, and enforcers for, their church and the Bible. Their gloomy interpretations of God’s laws and wrath sucked the joy from not only their own lives but from mine and, I suspect, everyone who had to listen to them.

Grandma, however, was different. Her quiet love of life and people calmed and soothed me like a glass of warm milk at bedtime. Hidden behind her Mona Lisa grin and that playful twinkle in her eyes lay a life lived in harsh times, in a harsh country–the Oklahoma panhandle during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl days. But she was too stubborn to let her troubles show, and too tough to whine about God’s laws and wrath.

Once, when I was about eleven, I spent most of the summer helping her with housework and gardening while she recovered from surgery. I never knew what kind of surgery. Adults of that era told children what they thought they should know, and everything else was none of their business. If I had asked about the surgery I knew the answer would be: “Don’t ask so many questions.”

I resented, not that I had to go help Grandma, but that almost all of my summer vacation would be eaten away in isolation from the farm, from my family and friends, from wading in puddles after it rained, from swimming in the cow tank, from flirting with the boys in my Sunday School class. I didn’t know anyone in town; no kids my age lived nearby–except for one boy who must have had friends of his own to play with. He never came to get acquainted, and I was too shy to go talk to him.

But someone had to spend the summer with Grandma, and since I was next to the youngest of five children–too young to drive a tractor and couldn’t milk a cow–I was expendable. And my slow, dreamy approach to labor put me less in demand than my older siblings. So I packed my Levi’s and T-shirts and resigned myself to a summer of solitary confinement.

I missed my family and dog Laddie, with that silly game he played bringing me dirt clods to throw so he could chase them and bring them back, slimy with slobbers, for me to throw again. And I missed the farm and its country noises–tractors chugging, mockingbirds singing, cows mooing, the windmill pumping outside my bedroom window–and the exquisite solitude when everyone was gone but me. But in town the birds still sang, and I learned to enjoy other sounds, the train’s whistle, the siren that announced the arrival of lunchtime at noon every day, the swish of cars driving by the house, Grandma’s soap operas on the radio.

Grandma always raised a garden, always planted petunias. As she grew older, arthritis slowed her down but couldn’t stop her from growing her garden. She called her aches and pains the “rheumatiz” and rubbed horse liniment on her knees every night. When that pungent smell drifted into my bedroom I knew she would soon be slipping into her nightgown, scrubbing her false teeth, and saying goodnight.

She went up and down stairs sideways, like a two-year-old child, holding onto the rail with both hands–four steps down to get to the garden and four steps up to get back to the kitchen. She kept her gardening shoes just inside the back door, near the steps, and slipped into them every morning on her way to the garden. She was proud that she had trimmed down from over 300 pounds to just 165, but her heart still suffered from having hauled the extra weight around for so long. She puffed, struggling up and down those stairs, emitting a little groan or “whooeee” when she reached the top or bottom. I walked behind her, always hoping she wouldn’t fall, always a little astonished at her perseverance and determination.

In the mornings, before the sun was high and scorching, I moved the hose and sprinkler around to water the grass and the garden. I hoed the weeds between the rows of green beans, snap peas, and little yellow pear tomatoes. I trimmed the edges of the garden so the Bermuda grass wouldn’t take over. Grandma and I picked grapes and plums, and I climbed the peach tree to pick the biggest, plumpest peaches I ever saw, before or since. She stood at the bottom of the tree and guided me from peach to peach. “Right over here, just to your left. No, back a little bit . . . right there.” I dropped them into her outstretched apron and she piled them in her bucket.

After a morning of picking fruit, we sat at the kitchen table and seeded purple grapes for jelly until our stained fingers looked like we had been playing in an inkwell. We pitted the plums and peaches for Grandma’s freezer and fresh cobblers, the most awesome cobblers ever to come out of an oven. She made the dough with Bisquick, marbling it through the fruit, creating a work of art with just the right mixture of fruit and dough. The kitchen, the entire small house shimmered with a fragrant glow while the cobbler baked. Then we scooped vanilla ice cream over it, warm from the oven, and ate until Grandma pushed her dish back and said, with a naughty little grin, “I shouldn’t have et so much.”

Years later, when I lived far away, homesick for a taste of my childhood and my favorite relative, I wrote asking her for her cobbler recipe. She sent it to me on the back of a tiny envelope with a fancy scalloped flap, written in her choppy handwriting, her old fashioned, undereducated way with words:

Cobbler

1 ½ Bisquick make thin batter pour in well greace pan fix your fruit suger it good put oils in some spice in peach or apple but cherry almond flavor but I expect you have other kind fruit down there cimmon and nutmeg spices that kind use

I followed her guesswork recipe the best I could, mentally drooling as the cobbler baked, taking myself back to Grandma’s kitchen and simpler, cozier days. As I finally pulled my cobbler out of the oven, however, I faced my first cooking calamity. My cobbler bore no resemblance to Grandma’s. It didn’t even smell like Grandma’s. It just lay there in the pan with its store-bought peaches and flat, sloppy dough, breaking my heart. I can’t remember if it was edible. Chances are I was too disappointed to taste it.

I never tried to make Grandma’s cobbler again, though I still have that precious recipe more than fifty years later. Grandma was and always will be the cobbler queen. No one, especially not I, can ever match her skill with fruit and Bisquick.

But every spring I plant pots and pots of petunias to set on my deck rail where I can sniff their warm perfume as I water them. I love their many different colors–red, white, pink, purple, lavender–though the darkest ones give off the richest scents. A petunia’s beauty is in its elegant simplicity; it thrives under adverse conditions; it is tough and hardy. Like Grandma. Petunias don’t require any special skill to grow. The only hard part is that, like the peach cobbler, the main ingredient is . . . no longer here.

At Grandma’s funeral someone pulled me away from her coffin. I had grabbed its sides, sobbing, longing to touch her warm, liver-spotted hands, the hands that planted petunias and baked peach cobbler, yet not touching them because I knew they would be cold and hard with embalming fluid.

I never knew who pulled me away. Whoever it was probably thought he was doing me a kindness, sparing me a bit of grief. But it didn’t feel like kindness. It felt like being disciplined, like a naughty child caught making rude noises in church. What, I wondered was so bad about crying at her coffin, about letting go of the grief I felt? Was I embarrassing someone? Were they afraid I would start screaming, make a spectacle of myself? And what if I did? People in other cultures, of other religions grieve openly, wailing and screaming, letting go of their pain. In our culture we hold it in, stifling our emotions.

I wonder what would have happened if that someone had not dragged me away from Grandma’s coffin, forced me to cover up my pain. Perhaps I would have embarrassed not only myself, but my entire family. Grandma herself probably would not have approved of my losing my dignity in that way, but she would have understood. And I would not have walked away from her funeral feeling cheated of my last chance to say good-bye to her, to her kind and generous spirit, to her cobbler and her garden. Still, that experience confirmed for me something I often suspected was true–that I had always been inexplicably out of sync with all of my relatives but Grandma.

So on summer nights I sit in my glider breathing memories of Grandma, dreaming of how she and I used to sit under the elm trees by her garden in those hard steel lawn chairs, me swinging my feet for that little bit of bounce, sipping iced tea, watching the traffic go by, enjoying the cool evening air. And with the soft creak of the glider singing to me, I close my eyes and wish away the years, bringing as much of her back as I can.

The End