Читать книгу The Twelve Gifts from the Garden - Charlene Costanzo - Страница 19

Time Travel

What nature delivers to us is never stale.

Because what nature creates has eternity in it.

—Isaac Bashevis Singer

Some days I feel drawn to a particular path. I call it the Time Traveler’s Path, largely because, when I walk through this area, I feel as if I have one foot in the here and now and the other in the long ago. It takes no effort on my part to experience this; it just happens. I believe the traveler’s palms are responsible. With their enormous, paddle-shaped leaves, they look old. They feel old. As a matter of fact, they’re anciently old. Well, not these specific trees, but the species is. It’s believed it has been around since 12,000 BCE.

Native to Madagascar, this exotic plant is actually not a palm. It’s closer to banana trees and bird of paradise plants. Its proper name is Ravenala madagascariensis. How this huge, exotic plant acquired its common name has a few interesting claims behind it. The plant’s giant leaf sheaths catch and hold a large amount of rainwater. Therefore, a traveler could count on obtaining water to drink from these plants. One legend says that if travelers or passersby make a wish while standing directly in front of the plant, the wish will come true. Another says that travelers can use the plant as a compass because the leaves tend to grow in an east–west direction.

I don’t know how much truth those legends hold, but I do know that this intriguing area of the garden kindles imagining and dreaming. Almost every time I am here, I feel transported.

This section of the garden is miniscule compared to forests, yet I find here a measure of the silence and peace that tranquil forests offer. I suppose it’s the ferns that blanket the ground beneath the palms that produce the cool, quiet forest effect. I can easily imagine a doe and her fawn resting here. I almost want to nap here myself. I wonder what dreams would come from sleeping on a bed of ferns beneath traveler’s palms that reach thirty to fifty feet high.

I recognize that my habit of becoming imaginative in nature as an adult reaches back to my early childhood sense of wonder. I recall the untended yard on the side of the apartment building where I first lived. Instead of unsightly weeds, I saw wildflowers in a mini meadow. As young children often do, I perceived beauty in the tiny yellow and purple blooms on the tips of tall weeds.

Memories of the child I was become a time-travel vehicle. While one foot remains firmly grounded under the traveler’s palms in the here and now, the other steps into the past. It’s the early 1950s.

I’m sitting on the bottom brick step of my paternal grandparents’ back stoop, watching birds drink and splash about in the birdbath in the center of their backyard. Shrubs of every size with flowers of every color edge the grassy square. Sometimes on days like this I would help my grandmother in her garden. As she nurtured her plants, she also nurtured my innate love of nature. But today isn’t a gardening day. I breathe deeply and smile as I smell the strong scent of roses. I’m about five years old.

After the birds finish their baths, I open the screen door, enter a breezeway, then step up into the kitchen, where my grandmother stands at the kitchen table kneading dough. I smell stew simmering on the stove’s back burner. I tell Grandma Gorda that I love the smell of her roses. She smiles and promises to send a bouquet home with me when my dad picks me up after work, which will be soon.

She covers the dough for its second rise and tells me it’s her prayer time. We go into the living room and sit side by side on a loveseat as she retrieves her old, worn, black leather-bound prayer book.

I ask her to tell me, again, about her prayers. I ask this often.

“Of course, Charlanka.” I liked the special way she sometimes said my name.

She tells me how she prays every day for me and each of our family members here in America. She names the twenty people who gather here every Sunday after Mass.

She shows me her prayer book, explaining that it’s written in the Slovak language, the first language she spoke. I run my fingers over the strange-looking script. She teaches me a few Slovak words, we sing a Slovak song she’s taught me before, and she reminds me how to count: jeden, dva, tri…

Then comes the best part. She prays for family back in the Old Country. Her family. Our family. My family. I’ve got relatives in the Old Country? Whenever I hear this, it leads me to feel “rich” in some way. I have cousins there. What are they like? I want to know names. Are there girls my age? Did they start kindergarten yet? She explains that all of our closest family is here in America. She doesn’t know names and ages, but she knows that families grow, so I probably have cousins near my age there. And even if we never meet our distant relatives, we are still related to them—connected. Her caring about them and for them is a lesson for me, and a gift.

After praying for all of us living people, both here and there, she prays for all who died. Even though she says this prayer in English, many of the big words are unfamiliar to me. But I get an image of a special, holy light shining upon each of these people. I always get good feelings from how she prays for our dead relatives with love, especially her first two baby girls, Anna and Helen. Sometimes she gets tears in her eyes when she prays for them. They are my aunts who are “like angels in heaven.” And then, she prays for all of our family who are not even born yet. She prays for the children I will have some day. And their children. She even prays for the boy who will be my husband someday.

Here, under the traveler’s palm, for a few minutes I bask in that memory. I feel as if she is with me.

With reluctance, I return to ordinary mindfulness. I’m in this garden in the here and now. At the same time, I’m feeling connected with my grandmother and her long-ago prayers.

Throughout their childhoods, when they were worried or upset, I sometimes reminded my children about those daily prayers, said long ago, like pebbles dropped into a pond of time. During any time of hurt or hardship, and every time I had any kind of accident or a near miss of one, it helped to remember them. I have a sense of them being truly present, having traveled through time to me, my husband, and my children, rippling over us. They ripple over my grandchildren now too—her great-great-grandchildren.

Grandma Gorda gave me the gift of seeing time and family differently. It was more like just a seed of seeing differently when she first presented it to me. But the seed “took” and became a seedling she watered and nurtured every time I saw her. It grew and bloomed. It continues to grow. I nurture it now. And I thank her. And I thank the traveler palms for the gift of this voyage through time.