Easter Essay
My grandma, plants, and plant schemes
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I woke up Easter morning and thought “Oh it’s Easter, I should buy a plant.” And then I thought of my mom and wondered what she was doing, and then I thought of my grandma (her mom), and that she’s been dead for almost three years. I remembered that I felt like my mom tricked me out of coming to my grandma’s funeral. I got lost in that whole story for a while.
I was visiting friends in Maine when my grandma died and I couldn’t get there in time for what my mom explained would be a quick burial and no ceremony. There would be a big family thing later that year, she said.
As soon as I realized that almost everyone in my extended family was there and it was the closest to a family reunion we would probably ever get, it was over. My favorite cousin read something I’d written. Most of my other cousins were there—many of whom I haven’t seen since I was a teenager. People who hadn’t spoken in years for reasons most of us couldn’t remember, talked to each other.
Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but burials and funerals are scheduled within reason around the wishes of the family. They could have waited for me. I was the eldest granddaughter and especially close with my grandma, though I’d failed her in her last years in the nursing home when no one could visit because of COVID and my family was falling apart because of my brother’s alcoholism.
When my mother talked with me later about how important the funeral had been for reconnecting the family, I got sad and then suspicious. Maybe she didn’t want me there because she thought I’d be difficult, fight with my brother, be mean to her, and/or not comply with her plans. I suppose all of those things were possible. Maybe my mom really had no idea it would become a real funeral and that everyone but me was coming.
I could have tried harder to get there too, but my two options were a 16 hour drive with my kid or somehow getting my kid to her dad, and then flying from NYC to Buffalo and then renting a car. I’m sure I had about 200$ available to me at the time, and my usual maxed out credit cards. These aren’t great excuses.
Easter, like most holidays, makes me think of my grandma. Though she is responsible for the some of the messed up things that have happened in my family, she was also a great grandma. We always had Easter dinner at her house, which was ham and scalloped or mashed potatoes, gravy, some kind of jello salad, some weird vegetable salads, rolls with very good butter, sometimes squash, and often cake or pie for dessert.
She was a excellent cook and could sew anything, often without a pattern. She loved having holidays at her house, card games, shopping, gossip, and her grand kids. She read a book or two every week from the library—usual historical fiction or romance. At Christmas she usually made between ten to fifteen kinds of cookies, and if she knew you had a favorite, she’d set aside a special Ziplock baggie of extra cookies just for you.
Mine were called Yum Yums—little peanut butter rice Krispie balls dipped in chocolate. She was a smart dresser, and got her hair done into an amazing gray helmet every week. When my first book came out, she bought four copies for the library and read it immediately.
Like many of the white Swedish-American people of her era she was racist, anti-semitic, fatphobic, sometimes self-hating, and probably homophobic. These things were not part of every day conversation, but they came up. I don’t want to pretend like she was perfect. She wasn’t, and she messed up her life and her children’s lives in many ways.
Her first husband (my mom’s real father) had PTSD and tried to strangle her one day soon after he came back from WWII. She told this story so matter-of-factly, I don’t think I realized how serious it was until I was a teenager. Broke, with three girls all under five, she married my step-grandfather, and eventually had two boys with him. He was not a good man, though I think my uncles—his sons— would disagree.
There is so much more to write about him, but that’s not a story I can tell. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I was reminded of the whole writing and family secrets conundrum when reading
‘s excellent essay “I Wrote About My Grandmother’s Abandonment. And Then My Family Abandoned Me.”Sometimes when people ask me what will happen if they write about someone in their family in an unflattering way and publish it, I have to be honest. They may cut you out of their life. They may be angry. They may get over it and they may not.
Eventually, because she wanted to have her own money, my grandma took the civil service exam and became the post-mistress of her tiny town, Chandler’s Valley, Pennsylvania. A few times when I didn’t have school and my mother had to work, I got to sit in the small house that served as a post office and watch her sort the mail, and tend to the drive up window where people came to get their letters and drop off packages.
She really loved that job, and I think it gave her some breathing room from her husband.
She also loved flowers and plants. Her house was full of them, and around the outside of the house were more plants and flowers. Usually at Easter, if the snow had melted, which sometimes it hadn’t in Western PA, we—my mom, my Aunt Sue, my grandma, me, and sometimes one of my littler girl cousins—would go outside to talk about the plants and flowers.
“How are the Hosta doing?”
“Do you want to touch the lamb’s ear?” This was a favorite of mine because the leaves felt like fur.
“The peonies didn’t do very well last year, but I’ll try again.”
“The tulips should come up soon.”
“Here are my bluebells.”
She usually had clippings for my mom and aunt, and for the rest of spring and summer, we’d wander around the outside of her house whenever we visited to talk about the plants. In later years, when my step-grandpa had passed away, we’d sometime drive to an Amish greenhouse to buy plants.
The Amish are a big part of Western PA and NY, and growing up we often bought things from them. Plants, pies, quilts, and hand-made toys. In my teens I was especially obsessed with a faceless cloth doll they made. It sounds scary, but really it wasn’t or not to me anyway, goth wannabe. The facelessness had something to do with graven images and that all faces are equal in the eyes of God.
I liked being a subject of fascination for the little Amish girls who would often hide in their mothers’ skirts. Young Amish men who hadn’t yet had sex/married were not allowed to grow beards. I can’t explain why I found this and them hot. In my later teens when I worked in a local hardware store, I lived for the young Amish men with their suspenders, non-bearded and blushing, and smelling absolutely awful. I’ve always had a thing for some people’s B.O. They usually needed a few things to build a barn or a house, which they’d do in a matter of hours or days, and they were always polite, unlike some of the construction workers who found it hilarious to put one lone screw on the counter and say, “Do you want to screw?”
My mom always wanted to get a hanging fuchsia for the front porch, and the three of them bought decorative flowers for around the hedges or for special flower beds. The conversation was about color, shade, sun, watering, and a lot of “What do you think about these together? What if I put these by the back door or down by the fire pit?”
My mom often planted purple flowers outside my bedroom window because it was on the ground level and she knew I liked that color. I usually picked impatiens which I thought until well into my twenties were called impatients. I still think this is a better name for a delicate, petally flower, that only lives in the summer and comes in shades as bright as nail polish.
I have written about some of the most horrible things in my family—trauma, abuse, and addiction. There is more to tell. But lately I find myself pulled to write about the beautiful moments in the midst of the bad ones. Maybe I need a break. Maybe you do. Maybe I want to hold onto the light next to the dark.
When I look over at my windowsill and the table where all of my plants live, I see an aloe plant that has managed to take over four different small pots, a succulent I can’t name, another unknown succulent, a spiky plant I can’t name, and a snake plant. When I went to Berlin, a plant I had for over ten years died, and I still feel a bit sad about it. I definitely want to replace her.
I didn’t get a plant yesterday, but I will soon and some soil to do some re-potting. I have plant food now. The heat in New York City apartments can make it tough to grown anything but succulents, but I’ll try. I’m hoping to get a plant stand too, and maybe I can get all of the aloe into one big pot. The spiky plant needs a bigger pot, and maybe I will figure out the unknown succulents. Someone told me there’s an app for that.
Enjoy the typos!
xoxo
Carley
I love stories about grandmas. No one writes their stories down, and they usually are the ones who held everything together.
💐 beautiful 💐