“Give it some
Miracle Grow. That’s what I do.”
That was my
Nana’s gardening advice.
As a kid, I was
curious about my grandmother’s penchant for growing fruits and vegetables. Her row
house in downtown Pittsburgh had a tiny backyard with no grass. Instead,
practically every inch was devoted to growing tomatoes, peppers, eggplants,
green beans, zucchini, basil, and rose bushes. She even had a grape arbor that
twined and tangled above the slim gravel parking space out back. This little
organic Eden didn’t make any sense to me. It sprouted in the center of what was
then a grimy city, where morning announced itself with steamy steel mill smog
and afternoon haze smelled like freshly poured pavement. The garden didn’t fit
in.
But I loved it.
I loved climbing
up to the grape vine with my little brother. We’d spend what seemed like hours
searching for sweet fruit, daring each other to eat the tiny unripe pellets
that we knew would make our bellies hurt. By September, most of the wine grapes
were large and pale green, and bursting with a surprising sweetness. I was too
young to remember whether or not my grandfather used these grapes to make his
homemade wine every year. I do remember that my grandmother later used his wine
as salad vinegar.
I loved the smell
of tomatoes on the vine. The pungent spice of the leaves and stems, the
leathery smoothness of the fruit. My grandmother had to remind me several times
a day not to pick the green tomatoes. They were so tempting! A child can learn patience through the slow
reddening of a tomato, and what sweet reward to those who master the art of
waiting.
I loved snapping
the ends off of freshly picked beans. Sitting at the kitchen table with my Nana
and a gaggle of neighborhood women. Their broken English chatter was background
noise to the click and pop of vegetables being readied and tossed into a large
plastic bowl. Nana would later dress the
velvety beans with garlic, green olive oil, and a little salt. They didn’t last
long. Green bean salad was a family favorite in late summer.
After my
grandmother died, I visited the place where she was raised in the South of
Italy. I walked the crag of road to see the dilapidated rubble that was once
her home. Her family had had no running water. No electricity.
But they’d had a
garden and a farm. And for this, they’d eaten like kings.
Most of the
mountain towns in Calabria are still awash in poverty, but their gardens are
lush. Tomatoes dry atop milk crates that sit on broken cement steps. Baskets of
fat eggplants and zucchini color the ochre stone stairwells in between dark
tenements with dented doorways. The contrast is stark, but it helped me make
sense of my grandmother’s little patch of green paradise in downtown
Pittsburgh.
As a child in the
mountains of Calabria, she’d had practically nothing. As an adult in the “land
of milk and honey,” she still struggled. Raising seven children in a tiny house
on her husband’s meager salary was not an easy feat. She did it though, and the
family that has bloomed from the passionate work of her heart is even more
beautiful than the garden she tended so carefully with her wrinkled fingers. I
know she is smiling down from Heaven at the crazy lot of us. From seven
children, she now has thirteen grandkids and seven great grandkids. When we are
all together, we twine and tangle around each other like the grapevines upon
which my brother and I once played. Some of us are spicy, and some are sweet,
and when tossed together, we are a colorful bunch. We love each other, because
she loved us enough to tend first to family. She was an amazing gardener.
Of plants and of
people.
A miracle grower,
of sorts.
I can only pray
that I’ve inherited just a smidge of her green thumb.
I have my own
garden now. I’ve planted some of the same things my grandmother did. I’ve also
tried a few new veggies, like Brussels sprouts. They’re doing okay, after a bit
of a war with cabbage worms that I believe I’ve won. I also accidentally
planted a pumpkin plant that I thought was a zucchini. It’s growing, although
the space is far too small. It’s twining and vining into my grass, and there
are little green pumpkins peeking out from some of the flowers. My kids are
thrilled to be able to grow their own Halloween jack o’ lanterns. Hopefully,
the pumpkins keep getting bigger and eventually turn orange.
I’ll try some
Miracle Grow.
After all, that’s
what she would have done.
NOT A ZUCCHINI PLANT... SNICKER
