Today is my grandmother's birthday. The willows are blooming here in Santa Fe, and after it rains, my garden steams. The earth is heavy with clay. I've been growing so many good things; I want to show her. I still think of her all the time.
I still write her letters about my life: my job, my garden, my writing, my partner. My high-desert home. I go to sleep and dream and send the letters then.
Hen passed two years ago, and this was what I wrote:
To Hen
I think of Hen and I’m thinking in pictures: her garden
path, blooming with primrose and myrtle, crocus and daffodil and peony where
the sun shone. Hen in the doorway of her Menands house, greeting us, or in the
library, reading the paper. I can remember best Hen bustling through the
kitchen, her African violets lined up on the shelf over the sink. I remember
the hallway where we could always find tins of cookies. I remember her dotted dresses,
the way she applied lipstick, and the distinctive way she smelled, like cookies
and her Yardley-of-London soap. I remember the places in her bedroom where we
hid the thimble, and I remember her dresser, set neatly with brushes and combs
and pictures of us. In one, we cousins are grinning in the sunshine, arranged
in a line according to our height, and in another Poppa smiles gruffly from his
seat on the tractor. I remember Christmases like fairy tales, meals around the
dining room table, breakfast on the sun-porch and always the sound of Hen’s
voice, the Yardley scent of her, her eyes bright upon us.
I think of all the places Hen has seen: most of all I
imagine that trip she took to Innsbruck long ago, when she waited for hours and
hours in the train while the German soldiers marched through the city. I think
of her courage, then and throughout her long life. I think of the children she
raised, and of the astonishing things they’ve accomplished. I think of Hen’s
wry, clever smile, and the way she devoured books. She gave me crayons when I
was very little and she said to me, Draw. When I got bigger, she said, Write
something. She taught me how to move about the kitchen and the garden, and she
introduced me to the realm of the artistic.
David, my
brother and Hen’s grandson, is living near Innsbruck now. He’s teaching English
and thinking of Hen, all the while watching the mountains while the sun shifts
and the snow lightly falls. Hen is
with you, I said to him when we last spoke. She is with you just like she’s
with me. She is closer to you now than she has been in years. She knows that
place, she’s seen those peaks, she never forgot that trip. Look to the
mountains, or in the cobblestoned streets, and you’ll see her, just the way she
looked in those old photographs we found in her bedroom years ago: her hair so
dark, her skin unlined and her smile quick. May she come to you in your days
and in your dreams, I said to him. You can find her in your own face and in
mine, for we hold within us the gift of her extraordinary life.
