Cold Climate Gardening

This is a poem I wrote in college, 1978 or 1979.

Stuffed Artichokes

Paring knife in hand
she trims the tough outer bracts,
peels woodiness from the stem.
I slice the top third off.
Her thumb plumbs the center,
pries the fleshy leaves apart.
Grandma’s hands apprentice mine:
lacking the tongue and time
of my ancestors, I learn their food.

Pasquale Porazzo sits:
pear-shaped, propped with a cane.
His nine children pose behind him.
Grandma is third from the left.

Many of them now dead,
their memories of his memories
punctuated with gravestones.
Grandma pulls a leaf back,
tucks a pinch of crumbs in.

This my inheritance:
to savor, to labor
for what is fleeting.

Josephine Porazzo LaFemina died yesterday, 98 years, 4 months, and 23 days old. She profoundly influenced my idea of what a garden should be. Long after …

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Today is my grandma’s 98th birthday. I originally wrote this essay for a Fine Gardening contest (which I didn’t win), and decided to revise it and share it with you in honor of her special day.

It’s funny how gardens are such emotional things. You enter some gardens and feel as though you are in someone’s living room, the kind of living room where they keep the plastic on the lampshades to keep them from getting dirty, and you are afraid to move for fear of breaking a knick-knack. Then there are the gardens that speak to something deep within yourself, that open up the hidden places inside you that bear witness: Yes, this is truly a garden. And it’s a place that draws you to itself; you want to go back again and again. But understanding what it is about a garden that creates that sense of recognition, of kinship, almost, is another thing altogether.

It wasn’t until I was an adult, attempting to create my own garden, that I realized how deeply my experience of my grandmother’s garden influenced my idea of what a garden should be. But of course, no one called it a garden, even though there were ornamental plants in it. We always called it the yard. The house itself was built close to the street; the yard was primarily to the right and the rear of the house. The entire property was enclosed by a hedge probably three to four feet high. There was a gate in the rightmost side of the hedge, allowing easy access to the neighbors. The main lawn, bordered on the left by the driveway and the right by this hedge, was the location of many family reunions and happy memories. My grandfather had built a brick patio and barbecue grill, and various male members of the extended family took their turns cooking everything from hamburgers to London broil. Meanwhile, the women were in the kitchen, frying peppers and onions and preparing other dishes. We children wove in and out of them, taking in the gossip and talk of politics, until the food was ready to eat. Eventually, the grownups settled into lawn chairs in the dappled shade. The great-uncles slipped us sips of their drinks.

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