My grandmother taught me how to make corn fritters one summer when I was staying with her. I think it was one of those weeks she needed some help so one of the grands was dispatched. (She was a low-key task master, liked to “watch” her programs in the afternoon and doze, so there was time to swing and think.) We lived out in the valley, about 30 miles over the river and through the woods.
With the fritters I’m pretty sure we had fresh tomatoes and green beans and a piece of meat. There always seemed to be some sort of meat to add to a meal. But the highlight was the corn fritters that were hot and greasy and the corn was sweet (and we had syrup with them). I thought about those fritters today as I finally hung the potholders that use to hang in her kitchen. They had been in my kitchen in Klamath Falls, though I didn’t use them, and then when we went to Belgium, I left them in storage. Today seemed a good time to break them out finally and get them into view.
I have this story I wrote quite a while ago, called Grandma’s Rose that is 90 to 93.8% “true”. Creative non-fiction, I guess. 😊
Grandma’s Rose
On the far edge of the Wallowa Valley there is a road that goes up past old farms and pastures and then plunges down to run along Sheep Creek. It’s the highway to Imnaha; a small community of people, built in along the rim rocks and wide areas of the Imnaha River as it continually carves the canyon on its way to the Snake. It’s a Temperate Zone in the Northeastern Oregon January, a lore laden winter home of the Nez Perce and a perfect greenhouse for those plants not hardy enough to survive the valley’s cold. Here my grandmother lived in a cavernous house built into a hill and surrounded by a yard that covered two acres from river to road above. Cherry, apple and apricot trees stand just through a pasture gate, none pruned down for over twenty years and inside the yard a rich and varied assortment of plants; a garden that produced enough for three families. I hadn’t missed it until one-night thousands of miles from home I watched an old movie and as the sun set over a desert, I clearly saw reflected the same shadows that filled the Imnaha late summer nights; and I went back.
That last summer I saw my Grandmother she was 84 and though the term elderly was not in either of our vocabularies she seemed to feel that ‘old’ could. ‘Don’t get old’, she’d admonish as though somehow, I’d been granted that power longed for and sought over the centuries. We sat on the back steps in the evening watching the last tips of sun down the canyon as they brushed over Chesinmus Ridge; the rim rocks slowly turning from gray to purple. The temperatures, which had easily tipped 105 during the day, eased with the fading sun and we emerged into the yard like lazy cats; curious and relaxed after the hours indoors. Then we began the mediative process of watering the gardens and flower beds in and around the yard.
My favorite plant, though long past blow, was an old lilac bush now as high and deep as a room. Inside it could, and had, sheltered me as I had played, just a few years prior, throughout the large yard exploding bloom-filled beds thrown haphazardly on the hill where my Grandmother’s house sat. I always took the sprinkler by it first, so that as the surrounding flowers got some welcome liquid that its shaded roots would drink too. I’d missed its last four harvests when the branches bent down with heavy blooms and I would sit within its arms and escape on fragrant thoughts. Part of what I had missed settling so far away from this land had been the early springs that came to the Imnaha and let us pick flowers in April and May before the valley shook off its last frosts and snows. Where each Memorial Day we could fill a pickup truck bed with flowers and drive the county roads laying boughs and bouquets on graves each stop a story and fingerprinted treasure of memory.
My Grandmother would set the big rain-bird near the raspberries, ensuring each row of the vegetable garden was hit and then she would go to the front yard. There just below the porch outside her bedroom window was a rose garden. It grew three colors, yellow, pink and red and though she had other roses throughout the property this was the only place where they flourished. Each year the vivid heads were a favorite take home of guests and grandchildren alike. She was in front when I came about the house passed the stone chimney made of river rocks and the ivy that clung to it stringy and pale. She wore her gloves and had been digging with her small hoe. Even in the coming darkness I could see a yellow rose glowing far back from the rest and I heard her talking, “Just like the first one he saw”. She turned and beckoned me over and then held my wrist while she told me about the yellow rose.
“Your Grandfather Jess, planted these roses here. He had seen the yellow one somewhere in New York before he left for France in World War One, he wrote me a letter, though we weren’t even courting yet. A lot of the boys wrote to me during the war.” She looked me in the eye when she said this, she was a beauty at 17 and I had seen the letters she’d saved…some marked with the dates the “boys” had died either in the war or the training to fly in Texas. “He said its color reminded him of the afternoon sun here and when he thought of that he thought of me. After he’d come home and we got married he made the plans to build this house and for a garden of yellow roses. Aunt Rita was back east then at school and she sent the roses here for our wedding, the roots wrapped in old newspapers and grain sacks. He kept them in a corner of his parent’s yard, down the river. It took two years to finish the house and yard. He brought then down here on the tractor.”
She stopped then and looked around the yard, “I could take you to each spot he tried them in over the years, they didn’t want to be here, they’d root but not prosper. So, every so often after a few seasons he’d move them, we’d never grown roses so we just thought eventually they’d find a spot. When he finally put them here your mother was already in high school …he’d been moving roses for so long…sometimes they’d stay for five years and then he’d be out digging them up again. Then he put them here. It was the same year Doctor Blackburn told him he had a bad heart and had to give up and smoking and drinking. Not that he’d ever been much of a drinker, but when the girls were little, he use to go off with Fern and Uncle Walt and they’d be gone for a few days…I wouldn’t know if they were alive or dead and sometimes, I didn’t care.”
I tried to see my Grandmother’s face now, hoping to see that this memory of my Grandfather, a man I remembered as a shadow of thought, wasn’t as bitter as the words. But she just stared at the flower and continued on, “I told him that if he couldn’t settle down then he could just stay away. That’s when he told me how frightened he was about the rose, you know I thought I’d married a fool then. Here I was telling him that if he couldn’t stay around with his wife and daughters and be respectable that he was not welcomed back and he was telling me about this bush! He told me that when he first saw the rose it was in a big yard by a big house and that he hoped that if he came back alive from France, he would build that house and own that yard and have me; and this rose. And that’s all he had wanted for those years he was away. And every time he moved the rose and it didn’t do well that he couldn’t make the dream his. That he felt as lost as the rose trying to find a spot to bloom. He had everything he needed sunshine and warmth and care but he couldn’t settle in. He told me that if I could hold on and keep trying that he would stop, but that every time he was out and drinking, he forgot about trying to stay rooted and just felt free. You know it hurt me too, that the drinking was more important, fed a need I couldn’t, but after he died, after he’d stopped drinking and long after he’d stopped leaving for days I understood. It wasn’t the drinking or me, it was his trying to live in a dream. He thought it would all be perfect this house and yard and life and when it wasn’t he didn’t know how to get by…so he went around it and away.”
She stopped in her story and got the hose from up the hill and we turned a small frog eye sprinkler on it and turned the water on. It was dark now and she set it at the edge of the roses. We began the walk back around the house, she took my arm stopping to touch a flower or looking at the stars. Then she said, “One year your grandfather took some trout up into the canyon where he’d found an underground spring and tried to transplant them. Over the years he forgot where they were and it became a joke around town about his fish hatchery. And every fall some hunter would tell us about these fish he saw in a spring and your granddad would ask him if he’d eaten any, because they were his… He was always trying to put things where maybe they didn’t belong. “She sighed looking at me, “Everything adapts though, if it really wants to survive.”
She went up the steps, into the kitchen and I watched her through the windows. And I thought how typical that each time we moved and got further apart someone would produce a flower of enduring truth and light and reflection and wipe out all the distances that had accumulated. I moved the water away from my sheltering lilac and marveled that my Grandparents had each moved and rooted until they found a place they could thrive and through it all had done it together, no matter the wait.
Long after my Grandmother had died, well into her nineties and years past anything she could remember as she succumbed to the haze of Alzheimer’s, I would see her standing at dusk in her garden watering the rose like a forgotten dream. And I would keep trying to settle and survive in whatever climate I was given.
Jess and Hazel Warnock 1922
I have this story I wrote quite a while ago, called Grandma’s Rose that is 90 to 93.8% “true”. Creative non-fiction, I guess. 😊
Grandma’s Rose
On the far edge of the Wallowa Valley there is a road that goes up past old farms and pastures and then plunges down to run along Sheep Creek. It’s the highway to Imnaha; a small community of people, built in along the rim rocks and wide areas of the Imnaha River as it continually carves the canyon on its way to the Snake. It’s a Temperate Zone in the Northeastern Oregon January, a lore laden winter home of the Nez Perce and a perfect greenhouse for those plants not hardy enough to survive the valley’s cold. Here my grandmother lived in a cavernous house built into a hill and surrounded by a yard that covered two acres from river to road above. Cherry, apple and apricot trees stand just through a pasture gate, none pruned down for over twenty years and inside the yard a rich and varied assortment of plants; a garden that produced enough for three families. I hadn’t missed it until one-night thousands of miles from home I watched an old movie and as the sun set over a desert, I clearly saw reflected the same shadows that filled the Imnaha late summer nights; and I went back.
That last summer I saw my Grandmother she was 84 and though the term elderly was not in either of our vocabularies she seemed to feel that ‘old’ could. ‘Don’t get old’, she’d admonish as though somehow, I’d been granted that power longed for and sought over the centuries. We sat on the back steps in the evening watching the last tips of sun down the canyon as they brushed over Chesinmus Ridge; the rim rocks slowly turning from gray to purple. The temperatures, which had easily tipped 105 during the day, eased with the fading sun and we emerged into the yard like lazy cats; curious and relaxed after the hours indoors. Then we began the mediative process of watering the gardens and flower beds in and around the yard.
My favorite plant, though long past blow, was an old lilac bush now as high and deep as a room. Inside it could, and had, sheltered me as I had played, just a few years prior, throughout the large yard exploding bloom-filled beds thrown haphazardly on the hill where my Grandmother’s house sat. I always took the sprinkler by it first, so that as the surrounding flowers got some welcome liquid that its shaded roots would drink too. I’d missed its last four harvests when the branches bent down with heavy blooms and I would sit within its arms and escape on fragrant thoughts. Part of what I had missed settling so far away from this land had been the early springs that came to the Imnaha and let us pick flowers in April and May before the valley shook off its last frosts and snows. Where each Memorial Day we could fill a pickup truck bed with flowers and drive the county roads laying boughs and bouquets on graves each stop a story and fingerprinted treasure of memory.
My Grandmother would set the big rain-bird near the raspberries, ensuring each row of the vegetable garden was hit and then she would go to the front yard. There just below the porch outside her bedroom window was a rose garden. It grew three colors, yellow, pink and red and though she had other roses throughout the property this was the only place where they flourished. Each year the vivid heads were a favorite take home of guests and grandchildren alike. She was in front when I came about the house passed the stone chimney made of river rocks and the ivy that clung to it stringy and pale. She wore her gloves and had been digging with her small hoe. Even in the coming darkness I could see a yellow rose glowing far back from the rest and I heard her talking, “Just like the first one he saw”. She turned and beckoned me over and then held my wrist while she told me about the yellow rose.
“Your Grandfather Jess, planted these roses here. He had seen the yellow one somewhere in New York before he left for France in World War One, he wrote me a letter, though we weren’t even courting yet. A lot of the boys wrote to me during the war.” She looked me in the eye when she said this, she was a beauty at 17 and I had seen the letters she’d saved…some marked with the dates the “boys” had died either in the war or the training to fly in Texas. “He said its color reminded him of the afternoon sun here and when he thought of that he thought of me. After he’d come home and we got married he made the plans to build this house and for a garden of yellow roses. Aunt Rita was back east then at school and she sent the roses here for our wedding, the roots wrapped in old newspapers and grain sacks. He kept them in a corner of his parent’s yard, down the river. It took two years to finish the house and yard. He brought then down here on the tractor.”
She stopped then and looked around the yard, “I could take you to each spot he tried them in over the years, they didn’t want to be here, they’d root but not prosper. So, every so often after a few seasons he’d move them, we’d never grown roses so we just thought eventually they’d find a spot. When he finally put them here your mother was already in high school …he’d been moving roses for so long…sometimes they’d stay for five years and then he’d be out digging them up again. Then he put them here. It was the same year Doctor Blackburn told him he had a bad heart and had to give up and smoking and drinking. Not that he’d ever been much of a drinker, but when the girls were little, he use to go off with Fern and Uncle Walt and they’d be gone for a few days…I wouldn’t know if they were alive or dead and sometimes, I didn’t care.”
I tried to see my Grandmother’s face now, hoping to see that this memory of my Grandfather, a man I remembered as a shadow of thought, wasn’t as bitter as the words. But she just stared at the flower and continued on, “I told him that if he couldn’t settle down then he could just stay away. That’s when he told me how frightened he was about the rose, you know I thought I’d married a fool then. Here I was telling him that if he couldn’t stay around with his wife and daughters and be respectable that he was not welcomed back and he was telling me about this bush! He told me that when he first saw the rose it was in a big yard by a big house and that he hoped that if he came back alive from France, he would build that house and own that yard and have me; and this rose. And that’s all he had wanted for those years he was away. And every time he moved the rose and it didn’t do well that he couldn’t make the dream his. That he felt as lost as the rose trying to find a spot to bloom. He had everything he needed sunshine and warmth and care but he couldn’t settle in. He told me that if I could hold on and keep trying that he would stop, but that every time he was out and drinking, he forgot about trying to stay rooted and just felt free. You know it hurt me too, that the drinking was more important, fed a need I couldn’t, but after he died, after he’d stopped drinking and long after he’d stopped leaving for days I understood. It wasn’t the drinking or me, it was his trying to live in a dream. He thought it would all be perfect this house and yard and life and when it wasn’t he didn’t know how to get by…so he went around it and away.”
She stopped in her story and got the hose from up the hill and we turned a small frog eye sprinkler on it and turned the water on. It was dark now and she set it at the edge of the roses. We began the walk back around the house, she took my arm stopping to touch a flower or looking at the stars. Then she said, “One year your grandfather took some trout up into the canyon where he’d found an underground spring and tried to transplant them. Over the years he forgot where they were and it became a joke around town about his fish hatchery. And every fall some hunter would tell us about these fish he saw in a spring and your granddad would ask him if he’d eaten any, because they were his… He was always trying to put things where maybe they didn’t belong. “She sighed looking at me, “Everything adapts though, if it really wants to survive.”
She went up the steps, into the kitchen and I watched her through the windows. And I thought how typical that each time we moved and got further apart someone would produce a flower of enduring truth and light and reflection and wipe out all the distances that had accumulated. I moved the water away from my sheltering lilac and marveled that my Grandparents had each moved and rooted until they found a place they could thrive and through it all had done it together, no matter the wait.
Long after my Grandmother had died, well into her nineties and years past anything she could remember as she succumbed to the haze of Alzheimer’s, I would see her standing at dusk in her garden watering the rose like a forgotten dream. And I would keep trying to settle and survive in whatever climate I was given.
A wonderful story. I love the Google Maps streetview with the chicken in the middle of the road! I've never seen potholders like this, I can't quite resolve the shape and how they are held.
ReplyDeleteThe little triangle skirts detach. I luaghed the first time I saw that street view, chicken crossing road and all...
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