“Gratitude must smell, if it has a smell, of rain-soaked earth,” the late Guatemalan Nobel Prize-winning novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias once wrote. Asturias’ musings on gratitude remind me of my grandmother, who was born in 1912 in a farming village in the Carpathian Mountains forming the border between modern-day Slovakia and Poland. It was a country childhood in a place of incredible natural beauty and was her life’s formative experience, instilling in her a lifelong love of the land.
She immigrated to America in 1921, and her family settled in a mining and railroad town in northeastern Pennsylvania. After marrying, she raised her own family in New York’s Southern Tier beginning in the mid-1930s.
I remember her most in early summer, when the Northeast’s backyard gardens start bursting with life. Her garden was the earliest wild place of my life. It was her sanctuary, where she harvested peace of mind.
It was a small yard. Crowds of pansies smiled – purple and yellow, purple and black, yellow and white. My grandmother thrilled in pointing out to visitors how the pansies had “little faces.” Sky-blue forget-me-nots blazed along one fence. Marigolds bordered the garden. Irises swayed in the breeze. Goldenrods ran riot in the late summer. Flowers blossomed in spring and summer, returning with the robins as delicate, subtle reminders of fun, beauty, and love.
An old chicken coop occupied one corner of the yard, a sturdy wooden shack wrapped in tar paper, paying tribute to her rustic ancestry. She kept her life’s secrets inside: bushelbaskets, metal tubs and pails, seeds, garden rakes and shovels, watering cans, a pitchfork. It always smelled worthwhile in there, of peat moss and soil. At night she slipped a stick through the rusted door latch. Right outside the door sat a compost bin, started long before it became fashionable to recognize the value of grass clippings and vegetable skins.
For many years, the backyard was dominated by a towering, gnarly, weather-beaten cherry tree that teasingly offered its sweetest fruit on out-of-reach branches. My grandmother extended a ladder up into this tough old cuss of a tree and climbed up, at some risk, to pick the bulging fruit. In the cherry tree’s shadow was a smaller, gentler pear tree with low-hanging branches within reach of my young, anxious fingers. A swing rested in the shade nearby.
But the backyard revolved around the garden’s carefully cultivated rows of tomatoes, onions, peppers, carrots, cucumbers, string beans, radishes, zucchini, garlic, and lettuce. The garden was the center of my grandmother’s existence, a physical extension of her soul.
In the autumn, she and I took our favorite excursion, the one I recall most vividly, the one I fidgeted for. The garden plot in early October was strewn with dried vines and weeds, wilted flower petals and rotting tomatoes, all of them mingling with the fallen leaves. It was a pleasant burial ground, an undeniable reminder of death renewing life.
Standing in the mild autumn wind, we’d sink a pitchfork into the soft earth where nothing was growing. Or so it appeared until we turned the pitchfork over, a shower of soil falling from the tines and the smell of wet earth rising toward the heavens, and I caught a glimpse of the year’s first potato!
And then, usually, more and more potatoes emerged with each upheaval of ground.
They were brown-skinned jewels that we plunked into a pail and washed later and admired. It was a rite of passage for me.
The garden revealed to me the wonder of growth, and the mystery of the unwitnessed. The thrill of discovery, and the virtue of patience. That, even surrounded by death, there can still be glorious life.
“You should see the nice potatoes I dug out,” my grandmother wrote to me in a letter I have saved, dated Oct. 6, 1982, my first year away at college. “Did your ears burn?”
My grandmother’s garden warned of early falls and despaired of dry summers. It spoke to the unpredictability of life, when tomatoes died on the vine, cucumbers went to seed, and potatoes rotted. Her garden was never perfect. Still, my grandmother savored what it did offer, was grateful for it, and shared it with her family and neighbors.
Her adult life coincided with some of the most rapid changes in the history of humankind, and I don’t believe she ever understood the fuss over most of it.
Through it all, she kept her heart outside with the plants and flowers rising from the earth. These were timeless and sustaining. The land was a faithful, steady companion offering clarity, quietude, and pleasure.
My grandmother’s focus was never material. She longed for neither riches nor travel nor glamour. She simply went out back to help a garden grow, nod appreciatively at a few fruit trees, and smile back at a crowd of pansies. She recognized the comfort and strength found on the land and treasured that privilege.
My younger brother is the gardener now. He tends wonderful beds of peppers and tomatoes, zucchini and cucumbers and garlic, in the spirit of our grandmother. I put pen to paper to harbor the memory of someone who taught me to listen to the wind; to revel in the fragrance following a summer rainstorm; to sink my hands into the earth now and then; to never forget to turn my face up to the sun.